NEW DELHI – Twitter stood firm when the Indian government last week demanded that the social media platform remove hundreds of accounts that criticized the government for its conduct during protests by angry farmers.
On Wednesday, under threat of arrest for its local officials, Twitter relented.
The San Francisco-based company said it has permanently blocked more than 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making fiery comments about Narendra Modi, the country’s prime minister. . Twitter said it acted after the government issued a notice of non-compliance, a move that experts say could put local company employees at risk of being in custody for up to seven years.
On a blog post published on Wednesday, Twitter said it was not taking any action against accounts that belonged to media organizations, journalists, activists or politicians, saying it did not believe that the orders to block them “are consistent with Indian law” . He also said he was exploring his options in accordance with local laws and requested a meeting with a senior government official.
“We remain committed to protecting the health of the conversation that takes place on Twitter,” he said, “and we strongly believe that tweets should flow.”
The growing conflict in India offers a particularly clear example of Twitter’s challenge to follow its self-proclaimed principles of support for freedom of expression. The platform was involved in an increasingly intense debate about the exaggerated role of social media in politics and the growing demand in many countries to tame that influence.
In the United States, Twitter was played at the center of the confrontation last month, after permanently suspending the account of Donald J. Trump, the former president, for encouraging protests in Washington, DC, which have become violent. In that case, she exercised her right under US laws that give social platforms the ability to police speech in their services.
But in India, Twitter is blocking accounts at the request of the government. Controlled by the Bharatiya Janata de Modi Party, the Indian government has become increasingly aggressive in suppressing dissent. He arrested activists and journalists and pressured media organizations to follow his line. It also cut access to mobile Internet in problem areas.
In the midst of growing rivalry with China, the Indian government has blocked several apps from Chinese companies, including TikTok, the short video sharing network best known for its videos of teenagers and pre-teens dancing.
The government has also taken a tougher stance against its critics on social media. Under Indian law, Twitter executives in India can face up to seven years in prison and a fine if the company fails to comply with government orders to remove content that it considers subversive or a threat to public order and national security.
The country’s judiciary has increasingly sided with the government, giving Modi a series of political victories, say lawyers and human rights activists. In November 2019, the Supreme Court of India ruled in favor of Hindus in a decades-old dispute over a holy site in Ayodhya contested by Muslims. It also postponed the lifting of restrictions on the Internet and movement in the contested Jammu and Kashmir region to a government committee.
Digital rights groups say government pressure on Twitter is tantamount to censorship.
“The power used to ban smartphone apps is the same power being used to direct Twitter to close accounts and order the Internet to shut down,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.
India represents a potentially huge growth market for global internet companies, with 1.3 billion people, expanding access to the internet and an aspirational middle class. The government’s strongest hand in the business complicates prospects.
The country ranks fifth in terms of requests for Twitter to remove content, according to a company transparency report, after Japan, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. The country has sent about 5,500 legal demands, including court orders, to block content. It also sent about 5,900 requests for access to users’ personal information between January 2012 and June 2020.
That involvement came to light last year, when a prominent public interest lawyer, Prashant Bhushan, wrote tweets criticizing the Indian Supreme Court’s role in eroding freedoms in the country. Twitter removed the tweets in question. Lawyers and digital rights advocates said at the time that the company set a dangerous legal standard. Twitter declined to comment on Wednesday and said it had removed Bhushan’s tweets according to legal guidelines.
Protesting farmers in India have opened up a new front in the government’s efforts to tame social media.
Modi is in a month-long dispute with the country’s farmers over his government’s market-friendly agricultural laws. Farmers, many of them from northwestern Punjab state, set up camps in areas around the capital, New Delhi. In late January, the protests turned violent after farmers entered the city – many on tractors – and in some places clashed with the police.
Last week, the Modi government asked Twitter to remove more than 1,000 additional accounts related to the protests. He claimed that many were led by foreign supporters of the Khalistan movement, an effort that had been more active in previous decades, which required members of the Sikh religion to separate and form their own country. Some were supported by Pakistan, India’s arch-rival neighbor, the government claimed.
Twitter initially suspended some of the accounts last week, including The Caravan, a narrative reporting magazine that has been covering the demonstrations closely. He subsequently reinstated the accounts after informing the government that he considered the content to be acceptable freedom of expression.
The conduct of the Indian government drew global attention last week when pop singer Rihanna retweeted an article about officials who blocked access to the Internet in parts of New Delhi during farmers’ protests there. Greta Thunberg, the environmental activist, also tweeted about the protests and shared a link to what she called a toolkit, which included talking points that supported the protesters, as well as information on how to join other people with similar feelings. Modi’s supporters took advantage of the link, saying it showed that outside forces were supporting the farmers.
Also on Wednesday, the Indian government appeared to demonstrate to Twitter that the company needs the country more than the other way around. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the government branch that presses Twitter to remove material, posted its response to the Twitter blog post on a competing service in India called Koo.
A virtual meeting between Twitter executives and government officials was taking place on Wednesday night.
Devdutta Mukhopadhyay, a lawyer who works on freedom of expression issues in India, said Twitter was moving in a “delicate balance”.
“For companies, it is a double bond,” said Mukhopadhyay. “They want their services to be available in the country, but they also don’t want to be complicit in censorship that doesn’t follow international human rights standards because it is arbitrary or disproportionate.”
She said Twitter should step back and “use its influence to show the same courage it did when it blocked Donald Trump’s account.”
“They shouldn’t let it go just because it is a developing country.”
Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.