IT ministry ordered Twitter to remove 1474 accounts, 175 tweets in one year: Report
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The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is learned to have directed Twitter to take down 1474 accounts and 175 tweets between February 2021 and 202, Indian Express reported.
This was revealed as Twitter has moved the Karnataka High Court, seeking to quash blocking orders for 39 of those links flagged by the Ministry.
The petition filed by Twitter Inc says that several blocking orders issued by the MeiTY under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act are "procedurally and substantially deficient of the provision" and "demonstrate excessive use of powers and are disproportionate".
The social media giant has told the court that the Ministry has been "increasingly" issuing orders to block entire accounts without informing the company of the specific tweets made by these accounts that call for their blocking, as per the petition, which The Indian Express has reviewed.
The company said that several of the URLs contain political and journalistic content and noted that blocking such information is a gross violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed to citizen-users of the platform.
The company has also claimed that the Ministry has, in many cases, not provided "proper reasons" for issuing the blocking orders, a requirement under Section 69(A).
"The blocking orders fall foul of Section 69A both substantively and procedurally and ought to be quashed," Twitter's petition mentions. It has further suggested that the Ministry modify the challenged blocking orders to identify specific tweets that are violative of Section 69A and revoke the account suspensions.
It is learnt that the specific details about the accounts and tweets that were ordered by the Ministry to be taken down have been submitted to the court by Twitter in a sealed envelope since Section 69 (A) orders are supposed to be kept confidential.
MeitY in June had set out serious consequences of non-compliance, including, but not limited to, initiating criminal proceedings against Twitter's Chief Compliance Officer, and granted last opportunity to comply with a series of blocking orders which are issued under the Section 69A of India's IT Act.
The letter also threatened that failing to do so would cause Twitter to lose its safe harbor immunity as available to it under Section 79(1) of the IT Act.
Due to the seriousness of these threats, Twitter has chosen to challenge several blocking orders issued by the MeitY under Section 69A through the legal mechanism of a writ petition before the High Court of Karnataka.
