Digital rights groups say the government’s pressure on Twitter amounts to censorship.
“The power used for banning smartphone apps is the same power that is being used to direct Twitter to take down accounts and order internet shutdowns,” said Apar Gupta, the executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.
India is a potentially huge growth market for global internet companies, with its 1.3 billion people, broadening internet access and aspirational middle class. The government’s stronger hand in the business complicates the prospects.
The country ranks No. 5 in terms of requests for Twitter to remove content, according to a company transparency report, after Japan, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. The country sent nearly 5,500 legal demands, including court orders, to block content. It also sent around 5,900 requests for access to the personal information of users between January 2012 and June 2020.
That involvement came to the fore last year when a prominent public interest lawyer, Prashant Bhushan, wrote tweets criticizing the Indian Supreme Court’s role in eroding freedoms in the country. Twitter removed the tweets in question. Lawyers and digital rights advocates said at the time that the company had set a dangerous legal standard. Twitter said it had removed Mr. Bhushan’s tweets in accordance with legal directives.
India’s protesting farmers have opened a new front in the government’s efforts to tame social media.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/technology/india-twitter.html