The government has accused Twitter of seeking to undermine India’s legal system and refusing to comply with the intermediary guidelines that allow it to claim safe harbour protection from any criminal liability in India.
“Protecting free speech in India is not the prerogative of only a private, for-profit, foreign entity like Twitter, but it is the commitment of the world’s largest democracy and its robust institutions,” the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) said in a strong rebuttal to Twitter’s accusation on Thursday.
“Twitter’s statement is an attempt to dictate its terms to the world’s largest democracy. Through its actions and deliberate defiance, Twitter seeks to undermine India’s legal system. Furthermore, Twitter refuses to comply with those very regulations in the Intermediary Guidelines on the basis of which it is claiming a safe harbour protection from any criminal liability in India,” it said
The government said Twitter representatives in India routinely claim that they have no authority and that they and the people of India need to escalate everything to the Twitter headquarters in the US.
“The purported commitment of Twitter, to its Indian user base, thus not only sounds hollow but completely self-serving. Twitter has a large user base in India, it earns significant revenue from its Indian operations but is also the most reluctant to appoint an India based grievance redressal officer and mechanism, chief compliance officer and nodal officer to whom its own users can complain, when they are subjected to offensive Tweets,” Meity said.
Meity said the draft rules were finalised after consultations with social media platforms, civil society, industry associations and organisations, besides using judicial orders including the Supreme Court. There are also several Parliamentary debates and recommendations to take appropriate measures.
“The Rules empower the ordinary users who become victims of defamation, morphed images, sexual abuse and the whole range of other abusive content in blatant violation of law, to seek redress,” it said.
The government accused Twitter of having opaque policies arbitrarily deleting tweets and suspending people’s accounts.
“Twitter needs to stop beating around the bush and comply with the laws of the land. Law making and policy formulations is the sole prerogative of the sovereign and Twitter is just a social media platform and it has no locus in dictating what India’s legal policy framework should be. Twitter has claimed that it is committed to the people of India,” Meity said.
The government cited examples of taking several days to remove showing certain locations Ladakh as part of China; action against users who perpetrated violence on Capitol Hill and not honouring requests of the government to block content of users during the Red Fort incident and not removing fake and harmful content on vaccine hesitancy in India.
