Twitter is taking India's government to court to challenge an order to censor content within the South Asian country.
Twitter's suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, disputes a recent Indian government order directing the company to pull content and remove dozens of accounts.
Twitter Files First Suit Against India IT Law Allowing Government Censorship of Social Media Posts
The suit is the first legal challenge that the company file against India's 2021 IT law that broadened the Indian government's censorship powers to social media posts, including those on Twitter that allowed authorities to have posts or accounts critical of them concealed from Indian users. Executives at the companies can face criminal charges if they do not comply with the demands.
The government had ordered Twitter to block around a dozen accounts and posts or face criminal action under the nation's sweeping IT law passed last year. While Twitter complied with the order, it is now seeking legal relief. No date has been set for the court to review Twitter's suit.
The laws have been met with wide backlash from Twitter and other social media platforms, which consider India as an essential part of their log-term growth plans. The companies have argued that India's rules empower the government to censor its critics, and undermine security measures like encryption. But Indian officials insisted thst the law is crucial to fight online misinformation.
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The suit comes after the company informed the Indian government last summer of its compliance with India's IT laws. This Indian law required Twitter to hire a domestic compliance officer and a point of contact for local authorities.
Twitter, India at Odds Over Policies, Government Orders
Before that, Twitter had been at odds with India for much of 2021. In February, the government threatened to jail Twitter employees unless the company removed content on the farmer protests held that year. In April, India ordered Twitter to delete tweets that disparaged the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recently, the Indian government ordered Twitter to pull tweets from the nonprofit Freedom House, which stated freedom of the press is on the decline in India. It urged both governments and tech companies to "uphold free expression, privacy and other fundamental freedoms."
In its suit, Twitter is not seeking to overturn the laws, but argues that the government interpreted those laws too broadly, the New York Times quoted a source as saying. Twitter alleges that the Indian government had abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform.
Additionally, Twitter said in the lawsuit thatsome orders to remove posts "pertain to political content that is posted by official handles of political parties," which it said, "was a violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed to citizen-users of the platform."
India's government urged Twitter to just follow the country's IT laws passed by its Parliament, saying it is everyone's responsibility in India, the New York Times further quoted Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's minister of electronics and information technology, as saying.
