NEW DELHI: Several digital rights activists backed Twitter’s statement where the social media company explained why it had not taken action against certain accounts. However, BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya alleged that the micro-blogging site is infringing on the Constitution.
“Twitter has not violated any local laws of the country. It has only challenged the lawfulness of the order that it received from the government to suspend certain accounts. It is a welcome step that a social media company is not blindly accepting legal demands, but actually standing up to protect users’ freedom of expression,” said digital rights activist and Medianama founder Nikhil Pahwa.
Malviya offered a contrary view. “Twitter can’t arrogate to itself the right to sit in judgement of what constitutes free speech. Constitution of India defines it and no entity can infringe on it. Under extant laws, a publisher and a platform are treated differently. Right to editorialise comes with obligations,” he tweeted around 3 pm on Wednesday.
Former AAP IT head Ankit Lal said that the perspectives of union government and Twitter are completely different when it comes to right to freedom of expression. “While Twitter looks at voicing opinion from a libertarian view, the government thinks of online dissent as anti-national and anti-India. There is a clash of values here,” he said, adding that the government had gone “overboard” when it came to issuing orders of account suspension.
According to Pahwa, the government’s order for suspension, issued under Section 69A of the IT Act, did not meet standards required for censoring online content. “Section 69A allows for the government to not disclose why it took action against a piece of content. But the government still needs to meet standards of necessity and proportionality. Those standards were not met in this order. I think it’s time for the Supreme Court to write down Section 69A since it has increasingly become a tool for the government to censor content online,” he added.
Divij Joshi, a tech policy researcher at Mozilla, also pointed out that the government order needed to be more transparent, if they wanted the company to comply with it. “The censorship of online speech is taking place in a completely unreasonable and arbitrary manner by the government, and in fact, it is often aided by the lack of transparency and accountability of online platforms to their users. The laws which enable censorship themselves are vague, and are one of the root causes for such opacity,” he said.