Government asks Twitter to block some tweets about Covid-19

Central government sent a notice to Twitter about the government’s handling of Covid-19 and said that some tweets are not incompliance with India’s IT law. Therefore, twitter blocked several tweets and some of those were made by popular handles such as, Revanth Reddy, Moloy Ghatak, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das.

Twitter didn’t mention which tweets have been blocked and neither have they stated the reason why they have been blocked; They just sent a notice to the users saying that their tweets were violating an Indian law. Twitter was asked to take legal action against specific tweets and the reference they have received is to the Indian IT Act,2000.

Most of the deleted tweets were about scarcity of resources to treat Covid-19 patients and some were also about the Kumbh Mela of Haridwar.

A few months ago also, twitter was asked to block some handles when the farmers’ protest was gaining momentum and now it’s the second time that government has told them to do so amid the second wave of coronavirus in India.

Twitter issued an official statement after being contacted the government that said, “When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter’s Rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only.

In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so they’re aware that we’ve received a legal order pertaining to the account. We notify the user(s) by sending a message to the email address associated with the account(s), if available. The legal requests that we receive are detailed in the biannual Twitter Transparency Report, and requests to withhold content are published on Lumen.”