In June, Twitter received an ultimatum from the Indian government to remove some 39 accounts and content from its platform. Sources familiar with the order say that if Twitter refuses to comply, the chief compliance officer could face criminal charges. They say it also stated that the company would lose its “safe haven” protection, meaning it would no longer be protected from liability for the content created by its own users. This is an escalation of a series of “Block Orders” or Content Removal Orders sent by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that have increased significantly in the past 18 months.
Last week Twitter responded: It will take the Indian government to court.
While the dispute itself only concerns specific accounts and pieces of content, experts told WIRED that its outcome could have major implications and serve as a “bellow hole for this ongoing battle over internet freedom,” said Allie Funk, director of research for technology and democracy. . at the Freedom House.
In particular, Twitter’s lawsuit focuses on Section 69A of the Indian Information Technology Laws. The laws, passed in 2000, allow the government to issue blocking orders, requiring an intermediary – in this case Twitter – to remove content that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty. The court filing is not yet public but argues the government’s requests are excessive and sometimes target entire bills, according to sources familiar with the filing.
Jason Pielemeier, executive director of the Global Network Initiative, says Twitter’s lawsuit has implications beyond social media platforms. “It will reverberate for all intermediaries,” he said. “Intermediaries as defined by Indian law include both mobile network operators and ISPs. So it really applies to anyone who could be seen as a bottleneck for content restriction or censorship.” Should Twitter lose in court, it could open the way for the government to censor entire websites, as well as media on streaming platforms like Netflix. or Amazon Prime, and could make it harder for platforms and businesses to push back.
“Around 2010 or 2011, the government set the rules for those earlier powers,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international adviser and Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now. These newer additions to the law in 2009 prevented platforms from publicly disclosing the blocking orders they received. “Even at that time, there was a lot of criticism that the rules gave all power to the executive.” Twitter’s case is not intended to challenge the constitutionality of 69A, but instead argues that some of the blocking orders do not meet the government’s own standards for determining why content should be removed, and that such orders would violate users’ right to freedom of expression.
Since India’s IT laws allow the government to secretly issue blocking orders, it makes it extremely difficult for individual users to understand why their content is being censored or to attempt to reverse the government’s decision. In 2018, the government issued a blocking order for the satirical website www.dowrycalculator.com, owned by journalist Tanul Thakur, who was not informed why the site was blocked and started a legal battle to find out. The government claimed that Thakur’s site was promoting dowries, which are illegal in India but persist in many places anyway. In 2018, Thakur told Outlook India that the site was intended to highlight this “prominent social evil.”
