Some part of the ruling BJP’s success in India is credited to its powerful presence on Twitter (and more generally, social media), but some on the right wing still feel that the social network has been stifling their voices in the country. This isn’t unique to India—Twitter is frequently accused of censoring conservative content, and US President Donald Trump is one of the people to agree, but here, the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology officially took up the matter, and asked Twitter’s officials to appear before it.
Over the weekend, Twitter responded stating that officials could not appear before the committee, citing the “short notice” of the hearing, ANI reported. The letter sent to Twitter by the Parliamentary Committee stated that the “Head of the Organisation has to appear before the committee,” sources told ANI.
According to Twitter’s legal head Vijaya Gadde, no one who engages publicly for Twitter India makes enforcement decisions about rules for content or accounts in India. This hasn’t satisfied BJP MP Anurag Thakur, Chairman of the Parliamentary IT Committee, who tweeted, “We will take appropriate action on 11th February.” The matter will be brought up at 3pm in Parliament on Monday.
Ahead of this, Colin Crowell, Head of Global Public Policy and Philanthropy at Twitter, posted a detailed blog about Twitter’s policies in India. Crowell wrote: “Twitter is a platform where voices from across the spectrum can be seen and heard. We are committed to the principles of openness, transparency, and impartiality.”
“To be clear, we do not review, prioritize, or enforce our policies on the basis of political ideology,” he wrote, adding, “Mistakes can happen. However these mistakes or “false positive” decisions, are not political statements of intent; they are the basic human error rate of running the fastest, most open conversational tool in history.”
“As our CEO and others have stated publicly, Twitter does not use political ideology to rank content on our service. When setting up a Twitter account, people decide which accounts they want to follow ― they are in control of the views they see and the content they are interested in,” he added. “India is the world’s largest democracy, and one of our largest and fastest-growing audience markets globally. We are committed to surfacing all sides of the conversation as we enter the election season in this extraordinarily diverse cultural, political and social climate,” wrote Crowell.
Earlier, The Print had reported that BJP volunteers wrote to the Parliamentary IT Committee asking for a hearing against Twitter and Facebook for bias.
The letter alleged: “Twitter and Facebook have been systematically trying to curb free-speech of individuals who subscribe to the non-Left-wing ideology by suspending their handles, restricting their reach and removing trends from the trends list. However, it has been ignoring offensive, abusing and threatening tweets from Left-leaning ideologues and senior leaders of the Congress.”