The suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, comes after the government threatened criminal action against Twitter executives if they did not comply with the order, the company said. The company had been given a deadline on Monday to block dozens of accounts and posts from being viewed within India. He complied, but then sought injunctive relief. The Indian government urged Twitter to follow the rules. “It is everyone’s responsibility to comply with the laws passed by the country’s parliament,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister for electronics and information technology, told a press conference on Tuesday. Twitter’s lawsuit follows separate legal action by WhatsApp which is also fighting back against the country’s tough new internet rules, which WhatsApp has described as oppressive. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for several years to limit the power of tech companies and more tightly control what is said online, and have used new information technology laws to crack down on dissent. . Twitter, for example, has been asked to remove content related to complaints about civil liberties, protests, press freedoms and criticism of how the government has handled the pandemic. WhatsApp had been told it would have to make people’s private messages “traceable” to government agencies upon request. In addition, the new rules required social media companies to hire India-based executives to ensure the companies complied with government requests to remove content and block accounts. If this were not the case, these executives could be held criminally liable, facing possible prison terms of up to seven years. Twitter has previously criticized the government’s tactics and called on it to respect freedom of expression. The company said India’s laws are being used “arbitrarily and disproportionately” against the company and its users, many of whom are journalists, opposition politicians and non-profit groups. Last year, WhatsApp asked the Delhi High Court to block the enforceability of the rule on the traceability of people’s messages. The government said in the WhatsApp case that the right to privacy is not “absolute and subject to reasonable limitations”. This case is still pending. The lawsuits are part of a widening battle between the biggest tech companies and governments around the world over which one has the upper hand. Australia and the European Union have drafted or passed laws to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other companies over online speech, while other countries are trying to rein in the companies’ services to stifle dissent and quell protests. UPDATED July 5, 2022, 12:11 pm ET Experts said the Indian government’s move to force Twitter to block accounts and posts amounts to censorship, at a time when the government is accused of weaponizing a loose definition of content it deems offensive to go after critics. In February 2021, the company permanently blocked more than 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from viewing within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory comments about Mr Modi. Twitter had said at the time that it had taken no action against the accounts of journalists, politicians and activists, saying it did not believe the orders to block them “were in accordance with Indian law”. In May of that year, police in India raided Twitter’s offices after the company decided to label tweets by politicians from Mr Modi’s party as “means of manipulation”. Those tweets attacked members of the opposition who had used the platform to criticize Mr Modi and what they called his government’s stumbling in the pandemic. And in recent weeks, police in New Delhi arrested Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of a prominent fact-checking website, over a 2018 tweet that shared an image from an old Bollywood film. The government said the image was causing communal disharmony after a Twitter account with few followers and only one tweet protested it and tagged the Delhi Police – before the account disappeared soon after. Last week, Twitter was ordered to block tweets by Freedom House, a US non-profit organization that cited India as an example of a country where press freedom was in decline. “It shows how an international report on India’s press freedom rankings is responding with censorship, rather than discussion and debate,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “It is an undemocratic and authoritarian response.” Lawyers and tech experts say Twitter and other social media companies are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are required to comply with the laws of the land, but are also challenged to defend free speech in the world’s largest democracy. “I think they are fighting a losing battle, because on the one hand, they are taking the government to court, but on the other hand, they tend to back down,” said Salman Waris, a lawyer at TechLegis in New Delhi. specializing in international technology law. Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from New Delhi.
