Twitter has lost its “legal shield” in India for not complying with the country's newly implemented social media rules, federal Minister of Information Technology (IT) Ravi Shankar Prasad revealed on Wednesday.
In a series of tweets, Prasad questioned why Twitter has not complied with Indian legislation, especially as Indian companies doing business in the US or other countries "voluntarily follow the local laws."
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) June 16, 2021
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) June 16, 2021
Further, the minister said that it's "astounding that Twitter, which portrays itself as the flag bearer of free speech, chooses the path of deliberate defiance when it comes to the intermediary guidelines."
The development comes just hours after Twitter was booked by the authorities in Uttar Pradesh for stoking communal rivalry between Hindus and Muslim.
In connection with a recent case of violence against an elderly Muslim man in Ghaziabad, Twitter has been accused of allowing the video of the incident to go viral on its platform, used by over 100 million Indians, according to Statista.
The video shows the elderly man being trashed and his beard being forcibly cut.
— Imran Hasan – عمران حسن (@i_am_imranhasan) June 13, 2021
On 8 June, Twitter agreed to comply with some digital rules laid out by India by appointing both a grievance and nodal officer.
Citing sources, Indian media reported that the appointed officers will be of Indian origin but will have to relocate from Twitter's headquarters in California.
India’s information technology (IT) rules announced in February mandate social media companies to appoint grievance and nodal officers to deal with user complaints and assist law enforcement agencies respectively.
One particular IT rule that has concerned networking apps is that which demands them to help security agencies trace the origin of certain problematic content on their respective platforms for investigations.
The deadline to accept the rules expired on 25 May, after which the government of India asked the apps to submit their compliance reports.
Other media giants like YouTube and WhatsApp have also started hiring people to fill the new required roles in their India teams.
