The government of India has threatened to punish employees of Twitter with fines and imprisonment of up to seven years for repairing hundreds of accounts he ordered to block the company. Most reports were critical of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
On Monday, Twitter complied with the government’s order and prevented people in India from seeing more than 250 accounts of activists, political commentators, a movie star and the Caravan, an investigative news magazine. Most accounts criticized Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister of India, and his government. But the company recovered the accounts about six hours later after a lawyer on Twitter met with IT ministry officials, arguing that the tweets and accounts were speechless and newsworthy.
The Government of India disagrees. The IT ministry sent a notice to Twitter on Tuesday, ordering it to block the accounts again. It has also threatened people working at Twitter’s Indian arm with legal consequences, which could include a fine or a prison sentence of up to seven years.
“It’s really problematic,” said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama, a technology policy website, and an Internet activist. “I do not see why the government of India should invade this area to try to censor tweets if they have much bigger problems.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment. An IT ministry spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The move puts the company in a difficult position. If the accounts are blocked again, it could mean that you are accused of playing an active role in a continuous suppression of differences of opinion in India as protests against the government prevail through the country. But keeping the bills on the platform means risking a political and legal showdown in a large market.
In the notice sent on Tuesday, the government said the bills were spreading misinformation about protests and that it had the potential to lead to looming violence affecting public order in the country. BuzzFeed News reviewed a copy of the notice.
The face comes days after thousands of Indian farmers, who have been protesting against agricultural reform for months, say their income would be harmed, broke through police barriers and on January 26 the Red Fort, a monument from the Mughal era in New Delhi, stormed. , Indian Republic Day. At least one protester was reportedly killed. Delhi police have denied any involvement in the incident.
In the notice, the government claims that the accounts used a hashtag that ‘was found to incite people to commit known offenses in connection with public order and security of the state.’
Although the Caravan did not use this hat brand, the government claimed that ‘news and press accounts’ disseminated misinformation, causing ‘incitement of people’ and ‘creating a public order situation’.
A Caravan spokesman told BuzzFeed News that his journalism was fair and professional. “We do not understand why the Indian government suddenly finds that journalists should not speak to all sides of an issue,” Vinod K. Jose, executive editor of the magazine, told BuzzFeed News.
India’s laws forbid Twitter from sharing the legal order it received on Monday, but according to Tuesday’s notice from the government, the company fought back. The document alleges that Twitter only blocked the accounts 24 hours after receiving the first order, and did so minutes before a lawyer met with government officials on Tuesday.
“It is clear that the offensive tweets / hashtag remained in the public domain and that it had to be tweeted and retweeted several times against the risk and cost of public order and the risk of incitement to commit crimes,” reads the notice.
According to the notice, Twitter also sent a response to the government after meeting with officials who refused to “obey and obey” the government’s order. According to Indian law, the notice reads, Twitter is likely to comply.
The government also rebuffed Twitter’s ‘free speech’ argument, saying the company had no ‘constitutional, statutory or any legal basis’ to interpret the expression of freedom of speech under Indian laws.
Twitter also argued that there was “insufficient justification” for blocking entire accounts and said the government should order individual tweets to be blocked. In response, the government’s notice said it was not Twitter’s place to ask the government for justification.
At the heart of the legal order is Section 69A, an article in India’s IT laws that allows the federal government to ask platforms such as Twitter to “withhold any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or offered in any computer resource” that the can disrupt public. Platforms such as Twitter must not only comply with these commands, but are also not permitted to disclose the orders themselves.
“I hope this case goes to court,” said Pahwa, the founder of MediaNama, “because I do believe that the government is likely to lose the case rationally.”