The Indian government has threatened to punish Twitter employees with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for restoring hundreds of accounts it has ordered the company to block. Most reports criticized the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
On Monday, Twitter complied with the government order and prevented people in India from seeing more than 250 accounts belonging to activists, political commentators, a movie star and Caravan, an investigative news magazine. Most reports criticized Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, and his government. But the company restored the accounts about six hours later, after a Twitter lawyer met with IT ministry officials and argued that the tweets and accounts were free speech and worthy of publication.
The Indian government disagreed. On Tuesday, the IT ministry sent a statement to Twitter, ordering the account to be blocked once again. It also threatened people working on the Indian branch of Twitter with legal consequences, which could include a fine or imprisonment of up to seven years.
“This is really problematic,” said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama, a technology policy website and Internet activist. “I don’t see why the government of India should enter this territory to try to censor tweets when they have much bigger problems to deal with.”
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment. An IT ministry spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The change puts the company in a difficult situation. Blocking the accounts once again would mean being accused of playing an active role in the ongoing crackdown on dissent in India as anti-government protests cloud the country. But letting the accounts remain on the platform means risking political and legal confrontation in a large market.
In the statement sent on Tuesday, the government said the accounts were “spreading disinformation about the protests” and had the “potential to lead to imminent violence that affects the public order situation in the country”. BuzzFeed News has revised a copy of the notice.
The clash comes days after thousands of Indian farmers, who have been protesting for months against agricultural reform that they say are damaging their revenues, breached police barricades and invaded the Red Fort, a Mogul-era monument in New Delhi on January 26. , Republic Day of India. At least one protester allegedly died. Delhi police have denied their involvement in the incident.
In the warning, the government claimed that the reports used a hashtag that “had been considered to instigate people to commit recognizable crimes in relation to public order and state security”.
Although the Caravan did not use this hashtag, the government said that “news and press reports” were spreading misinformation, causing “people to be instigated” and creating “a public order situation”.
A Caravan spokesman told BuzzFeed News that his journalism was fair and professional. “We don’t understand why the Indian government suddenly discovers that journalists shouldn’t talk about all sides of an issue,” Vinod K. Jose, the magazine’s executive editor, told BuzzFeed News.
Indian laws prohibit Twitter from sharing the legal order it received on Monday, but according to the government statement on Tuesday, the company responded. The document states that Twitter did not block accounts until 24 hours after receiving the first request, and did so just minutes before a Twitter lawyer met with government officials on Tuesday.
“It is clear that the offensive tweets / hashtag have remained in the public domain and must have been tweeted and retweeted several times at the risk and cost of public order and the risk of inciting crimes,” says the warning.
According to the warning, Twitter also sent a response to the government after it met with officials who refused to “comply and obey” the government’s order. Under Indian law, the warning says, Twitter is required to comply.
The government also countered Twitter’s “freedom of speech” argument, saying the company had no “constitutional, statutory or other basis” to interpret what constituted freedom of expression under Indian law.
Twitter also argued that there was “sufficient justification” for blocking entire accounts and said the government should have ordered the blocking of individual tweets. In response, the government note said it was not up to Twitter to seek government justification.
At the heart of the legal order is Section 69A, an article in India’s IT laws that allows the federal government to request platforms like Twitter to retain “any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted on any computer resource” that can disrupt the “public order.” Platforms like Twitter are not only required to comply with these requests, but they also cannot make the requests themselves public.
“I hope this case goes to court,” said Pahwa, the founder of MediaNama, “because I believe that, rationally, the government is likely to lose the case.”