Government Issues Warning to Twitter for Refusal to Block URLs Related to Farmers’ Protest

In a recent online interview, Jack Dorsey, the cofounder and former CEO of Twitter, revealed that the Indian government had allegedly issued threats to the social media platform. The government reportedly warned Twitter of office closures and raids if it did not comply with requests to block accounts criticizing the government during the farmers’ protest. On July 21, the Central government acknowledged sending a notice to Twitter, cautioning the company about potential “significant consequences” for its failure to block 167 out of the 3,750 URLs it had instructed to be removed.

According to reports, the government stated that the decision to block these URLs was made under the Information Technology Act, which empowers the government to remove any such content that may be against national security.

Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Parliament: “On 27/06/2022, the government issued a notice to Twitter which gave them an opportunity to fully comply. Otherwise, they would have had to face significant consequences as mentioned in the IT Act, 2000. After this notice, Twitter complied with all the provisions of Section 9 of the IT Act 20069”. Chandrasekhar was responding to a question raised in the Rajya Sabha.

Although the Union minister admitted that he had sent the notice, he denied that he had threatened Twitter with warrant raids or the closure of its India offices. It also dismissed the idea that it ever requested user information from all social media accounts.

The center accepts the sending of a Twitter notification

This is not the first time Chandrasekhar has responded to these allegations. He wrote a lengthy tweet after Dorsey’s interview surfaced, saying: “This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to debunk a very questionable period in Twitter’s history.” He then followed up with the next part of his tweet titled “Facts and the truth”: “@twitter and Dr Dorsey’s team repeatedly and consistently violated the Indian law. In fact, they repeatedly failed to comply with the law from 2020 to 2022, and only in June 2022 did they finally comply.”

Reacting to the allegations at the time, former IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “Twitter did not follow Indian laws at the time. Obviously, all social media platforms are respected in India, but they have to follow the laws of the country.