Twitter said Tuesday it had sued the Indian government, challenging a recent order to remove content and block accounts in the country.
The lawsuit was filed in Karnataka High Court in Bangalore after the government threatened criminal action against Twitter executives for failing to comply with the order, the company said.
The company had a deadline on Monday to block dozens of accounts and posts in India. He complied, but then asked for legal aid.
The Indian government urged Twitter to follow the rules. “It is everyone’s responsibility to comply with the laws passed by the country’s parliament,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of electronics and information technology, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Twitter’s lawsuit follows a separate legal action by WhatsApp that also cracked down on the country’s new strict rules involving the Internet, which WhatsApp has called oppressive.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party, Bharatiya Janata, have worked for several years to restrict the power of technology companies and more strictly control what is said online, and have used the new technology laws. of information to suppress dissent. . Twitter, for example, has been told to remove content related to civil liberties complaints, protests, press releases and criticism of how the government has handled the pandemic. WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned service that sends encrypted messages, had been told that people’s private messages should be “tracked” to government agencies on request.
In addition, the new rules required social media companies to hire executives based in India to ensure that companies comply with government requests for content withdrawal and account blocking. If that doesn’t happen, these executives could be held criminally liable and face possible prison sentences of up to seven years.
Twitter has previously criticized the government’s tactics and asked it to respect freedom of expression. The company said India’s laws were being used “arbitrarily and disproportionately” against the company and its users, many of whom are journalists, opposition politicians and non-profit groups.
Last year, WhatsApp asked the Delhi High Court to block the enforcement of the rule on the traceability of people’s messages. The government has said regarding the WhatsApp case that the right to privacy is not “absolute and is subject to reasonable restrictions.”
This case is still pending.
Demands are part of an ever-widening battle between larger technology companies and governments around the world over which one has the edge. Australia and the European Union have drafted or passed laws to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other companies over online discourse, while other countries are trying to control the services of companies to quell dissent and stifle protests.
Updated
July 5, 2022, 01:25 ET
Experts said the Indian government’s decision to force Twitter to block accounts and posts was censored, at a time when the government is accused of using a lax definition of what content it considers offensive to pursue critics.
In February 2021, the company permanently blocked more than 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others out of sight to India after the government accused them of making inflammatory comments about Mr Modi. Twitter said at the time that it was not taking any action on the accounts of journalists, politicians and activists, and said it did not believe the orders to block them “are consistent with Indian law”.
In May of that year, Indian police stormed Twitter offices after the company decided to tag the tweets of politicians from Mr’s party. “Manipulated media” mode. These tweets attacked members of the opposition who had been using the platform to criticize Mr Modi and what they called his government’s stumbling response to the pandemic.
And in recent weeks, New Delhi police have arrested Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of a prominent fact-checking website, for a 2018 tweet that shared an image of an old Bollywood film. The government said the image was causing community disharmony, after a Twitter account with only a few followers and only one tweet complained about it and tagged Delhi police, before the account disappeared shortly afterwards.
Last week, Twitter was ordered to block tweets from Freedom House, an American nonprofit organization that cited India as an example of a country where press freedom was in decline.
“It is explaining how an international report on India’s press freedom rankings is answered with censorship, rather than debate and discussion,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “It’s an undemocratic and authoritarian response.”
Lawyers and tech experts say Twitter and other social media companies are trapped between a rock and a hard place. They are required to comply with the laws of the country, but they are also challenged to defend freedom of expression in the world’s largest democracy.
“I think they’re fighting in a losing battle, because on the one hand they take the government to court, but on the other hand they tend to give in,” said Salman Waris, a TechLegis lawyer in New Delhi specialist. in international technology law.
Mujib Mashal contributed to the report.