On June 25, the Union IT Minister of India Ravi Shankar Prasad informed that US-based microblogging site Twitter had denied access to his personal account for almost an hour because of an alleged violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA.
Friends! Something highly peculiar happened today. Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account. pic.twitter.com/WspPmor9Su
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) June 25, 2021
Copyright users can call for The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to flag use of their content online without their permission.
The IT Minister stated that actions committed by Twitter were in gross violation of Rule 4(8) of Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 as they did not provide Prasad any prior notice before denying him the access.
The minister said in a series of tweet, “Further, it is now apparent as to why Twitter is refusing to comply with the Intermediary Guidelines because if Twitter does comply it, it would be unable to arbitrarily deny access to an individual’s account which does not suit their agenda.”
Furthermore, in the past several years, no television channel or any anchor has made any complaints about copyright infringements with regard to these news clips of my interviews shared on social media.
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) June 25, 2021
He added that the microblogging platform’s actions are not the messenger of free speech that they claim to be but are only interested in administering their own agenda.
The social networking service has accused the Indian government of ‘dangerous overreach’ as well as claimed that it had been forced to ‘withheld’ portions of legitimate free speech.
On June 16th, Twitter ended up losing its intermediary status in the country after the government of India said it had provided the platform with many opportunities to comply with the new IT rules.
