Twitter sues Indian government, challenging orders to remove content

Twitter on Tuesday filed a lawsuit towards the Indian authorities, pushing again towards orders to censor content material on its platform.

The lawsuit, filed within the Karnataka Excessive Courtroom in Bangalore towards the Union Authorities of India, is a part of a broadening battle between tech giants and governments all over the world, together with within the Center East, the place activists and journalists have raised critical considerations over the difficulty of censorship.

Afreen Fatima on the the plight of Indian Muslims below Modi

Learn Extra »

Tuesday’s submitting comes after India’s info and expertise ministry had requested Twitter to take down a number of accounts and tweets that have been non-compliant with its new IT legal guidelines that permit the federal government to dam entry to content material within the curiosity of nationwide safety, amongst different causes.

The federal government lately demanded the US firm to take down tweets from Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, a critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist authorities; and Indian journalist Mohammed Zubair, who was lately arrested over his tweets. Zubair is a outstanding journalist identified for debunking pretend information, monitoring hate speech and exposing Islamophobia.

Opponents of Modi’s authorities have in the meantime accused his authorities of utilizing the nation’s legal guidelines to clamp down on dissent and criticism.

Center East censorship

Across the Center East, activists, journalists and rights teams have raised alarm bells over the usage of government-linked propaganda campaigns and censorship by governments to suppress dissent. Social media corporations together with Twitter are on the centre of many of those circumstances.

ADVERTISEMENT

Twitter has eliminated hundreds of accounts which have been linked to propaganda campaigns by governments, together with Saudi Arabia and Egypt. 

Nonetheless, on the identical time, corporations together with Twitter have been accused of suppressing content material important of Center East governments.

For years, Palestinians have highlighted how social media corporations censor their content material and have accused the social media big of getting bias in direction of Israel.

Activists and rights teams have accused Fb, which additionally owns Instagram and WhatsApp, of censoring Palestinians and their allies, following the removing of pro-Palestinian posts. 

Practically 200 Fb workers members additionally accused its techniques of unfairly taking down or down-ranking pro-Palestine content material earlier than and through Israel’s offensive on Gaza in Might 2021.

In 2020, Twitter suspended dozens of Palestinian and pro-Palestine accounts, a day after an Israeli ministry report was launched on “phony” on-line profiles that criticised Israel.