Indian Court Dismisses Twitter’s Lawsuit Challenging Censorship
According to TechCrunch, Twitter’s lawsuit against India regarding content blocking orders has been dismissed by the Karnataka High Court. The court stated that Twitter did not provide a satisfactory explanation for its delay in complying with the new IT laws. Additionally, the court has imposed a fine of 5 million rupees ($61,000) on the company owned by Elon Musk.
“Your client (Twitter) was served with notices and your client failed to comply. The penalty for failure to comply is seven years in prison and an unlimited fine. It also did not deter your client,” the judge told Twitter’s legal office. “So you’ve given no reason why you delayed compliance, a delay of over a year … and then all of a sudden you’re complying and approaching court. You’re not a farmer, you’re a billion dollar company.”
Twitter’s relationship with India was strained for much of 2021. In February, the government threatened to jail Twitter employees unless the company removed content related to that year’s farmer protests. Soon after, India ordered Twitter to collect tweets criticizing the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, the government ordered Twitter to block tweets from Freedom House, a non-profit organization that claimed India was an example of a country where press freedom is on the decline.
These incidents put Twitter in a dangerous position. It had to either comply with government orders to block content (and face censorship criticism at home and abroad) or ignore them and risk losing its legal immunity. In August, it complied and removed the content as ordered.
The court’s order follows Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s recent comments that India threatened to raid employees’ homes if it did not comply with orders to delete posts and accounts. In a tweet, India’s deputy minister for information technology called it a “blatant lie” and said Twitter was “not following the law.”
Twitter filed the suit around the same time Elon Musk began trying to back out of buying Twitter. Since then, Twitter has often complied with government takedown requests — most recently in Turkey, where it restricted access to some tweets ahead of a hotly contested election won by current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
