The US state department on Thursday 11th February extended their support towards freedom of speech online and offline amidst tension between Twitter and the Indian government for removing posts with controversial hashtags.
“The United States is committed to supporting democratic values and promoting human rights, including freedom of expression online and offline.” We refer you to Twitter for information on its policies,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in response to a question.
The quarrel between Twitter and the Indian government began during the latter half of January when the social media platform unblocked 250 accounts that used a hashtag referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and farmer genocide.
The IT ministry of India sent Twitter a list of 257 handles and tweets with a request to be removed. Twitter blocked them for a few hours, it unblocked them as there were no grounds to keep them blocked.
The micro-blogging platform said it took measures to reduce the visibility of the hashtags containing disturbing content, which consisted of prohibiting them from trending on Twitter. It has also taken various enforcement actions such as a permanent suspension in cases against more than 500 accounts spotlighted by MeitY orders for clear violations of Twitter’s rules.
Apart from that, it has held back a part of the accounts (tweet, media or thread) discovered in the blocking orders under its country withheld content policy in India only. Although these continue to be available outside of India.
On Wednesday 10th February, Twitter made public a detailed statement on the content removal requests by the government, stating that it has taken action against hundreds of accounts after MeitY published a non-compliance notice threatening penal action. It assured that the action wasn’t taken on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists and politicians.
As a retort, MeitY claimed Twitter’s response in a blog post is “unusual”.
“Upon the request of Twitter seeking a meeting with the government, the Secretary IT was to engage with senior management of Twitter. In this light, a blog post published prior to this engagement is unusual. The government will share its response soon,” said MeitY in its response.
