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India Wants More Control Over Social Media. Twitter Is Pushing Back.

Modi is the most followed world leader on Twitter. His government wants social media companies to promptly process content removal requests.
Shamani Joshi
Mumbai, IN
India Wants To Have More Control Over Social Media

Facebook and YouTube said they would comply with strict new rules in India requiring them to promptly review and remove posts and videos at the government’s request, requirements that critics said threaten the privacy and free speech of social media users.

However, on Thursday, Twitter’s policy team tweeted that the company planned to push back on the new rules, saying it was deeply committed to the people of India and free speech.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government gave social media companies in India a three-month deadline to comply to the new rules by Wednesday. 

Under the rules, the platforms must process official requests for content removal within 36 hours. Failing to do so could expose local employees of the social media companies to legal consequences, including arrest and up to seven years’ imprisonment.

The tightening internet regulation comes as the Indian government increasingly seeks to shut down criticism, including critiques of its handling of the COVID-19 crisis. 

“We aim to comply,” a Facebook spokesperson told VICE World News the day of the deadline. Google, which owns YouTube, said in a statement to Indian press that it aimed to comply with the new rules, citing a “long history” of managing content according to changes in local laws.

If the American companies don’t comply with the new rules, they risk losing legal status as an intermediary, which protects their employees from being prosecuted for posts made by users on their websites.

“There is a tangible threat of these platforms losing their intermediary status, and if they’re non-compliant over a period of time they can be criminally prosecuted and even blocked,” Apar Gupta, a digital rights activist and founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told VICE World News. 

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Gupta added that TikTok, a platform that had over 20 million active users in India, was blocked after the Indian government said it was not compliant with its requests.

In terms of the number of users, India is the biggest market for both Facebook and YouTube and the third-biggest for Twitter.

Critics have called the requirements a form of censorship that would tilt speech on the platforms in the Indian government’s favour.

The new rules affect all social media companies with more than 5 million users. They also require the platforms to hand over user information to law enforcement agencies within 72 hours of a government request. To comply, companies must also appoint compliance officers who live in India.

The Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp, which has 400 million users in India, has sued the Indian government over the new rules. 

“Requiring messaging apps to ‘trace’ chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy,” the company said in a statement sent to Indian press.

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Currently, there are six other legal cases against the new rules, initiated by digital news organizations and free speech unions. 

Previously, Indian law did not specify timelines for social media companies to hand over information to the government or consequences if the companies did not cooperate with the government’s requests.

Gupta, the digital rights advocate, said the reduced timeline “does not give enough time for a lawyer to assess the notice, look at case law and apply it to each request that comes in.”

“The government has said the rules are a way to counter the online harm these platforms have [caused], but in practice the rules will actually centralise a greater amount of power in favour of the government,” he said.

Earlier this week, Indian police raided Twitter’s offices in Delhi and Gurgaon after the company refused to remove a “manipulated media” tag from a tweet by an Indian government spokesperson. Twitter called the police actions intimidation tactics.

While some think tanks said the new rules were “well-intended” and brought clarity to the responsibility of social media companies as a platform, critics argue that they are undemocratic and could negatively impact the way Indians use the internet. 

The rules were announced soon after India’s government threatened to imprison Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter employees in India if they failed to comply with its requests to take down posts about farmers’ protests against new agriculture laws.

Last month, the government also ordered Twitter to take down tweets and asked Facebook and Instagram to remove posts that criticised the government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. 

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