U.S. social media giant Twitter clashed with India on Wednesday, saying that a government order to remove some accounts was not consistent with Indian law, while politicians asked followers to switch to the app. rival site Koo.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has ordered Twitter to remove more than 1,100 accounts and posts that he said are spreading misinformation about widespread farmers’ protests against the new agricultural laws.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Twitter said it did not fully comply with some requests, as it believed they did not comply with Indian law.
“In accordance with our principles for the defense of protected expression and freedom of expression, we take no action on accounts that consist of media entities, journalists, activists and politicians,” he said.
The move puts the company and its executives at the center of a political storm. The government threatened legal action that could result in fines or imprisonment for Twitter employees responsible for implementing government policies.
It also comes after Twitter’s top lobbyist in India, Mahima Kaul, resigned as the company struggles to contain a growing public relations crisis.
Public opinion in one of Twitter’s main markets is divided. Some lawyers say Twitter must comply with or challenge the order in court, while activists blame the government for using legal devices to curb freedom of expression.
India’s information technology ministry said it was not common for Twitter to publish its blog ahead of a planned meeting between company executives and its top employee on Wednesday, adding that it would issue a response later.
But in a sign of growing discontent with Twitter, the IT ministry first posted its statement in Koo, where it has only 41,000 followers, less than a tenth of its Twitter followers.
Koo goes up
Following government orders, Twitter has permanently suspended more than 500 accounts that it said were involved in platform manipulation and spam. For many others, it restricts access only in India and its tweets can still be read abroad.
For Twitter, the stakes are high in a country of 1.3 billion, where it has millions of users and is used diligently by Modi, his ministers and other leaders to communicate with the public. Twitter does not publish the number of Indian users.
As the dispute affects Twitter, many Indian politicians and users are joining the Twitter-like social media platform launched last year, Koo.
#kooapp was Twitter’s main trend in India on Wednesday, with almost 21,000 posts, followed by #BanTwitter.
Twitter declined to comment on the migration of some of its users to Koo.
Several people on Twitter, including Trade Minister Piyush Goyal, posted tweets this week saying “Now I’m on Koo”. Goyal, who has 9.6 million followers on Twitter, has a tweet posted asking people to connect with him on the Indian platform.
Sambit Patra, a national spokesman for Modi’s ruling party, and his IT chief, Amit Malviya, also joined Koo on Wednesday.
Koo, who has a yellow bird as a logo, said downloads have increased 10-fold in the past two days, to more than 3 million.
“In the past 48 hours, there have been the largest number of applications,” Koo co-founder Mayank Bidawatka told Reuters. “I have slept for two hours in the past few days.”