New Delhi, June 25

In a fresh standoff between the government and Twitter, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today said the microblogging site denied him access to his account for almost an hour over alleged violation of a US copyright law.

“Friends! Something highly peculiar happened today. Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account,” Prasad said terming Twitter’s action as a gross violation of Rule 4(8) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, where they failed to give the minister a prior notice before such an action.

The minister said it was apparent that his statements calling out the “high-handedness and arbitrary actions of Twitter have clearly ruffled its feathers”. — TNS