India asks Twitter to take down tweets critical of COVID handling | Al Jazeera

The Indian government asked social media platform Twitter to take down dozens of tweets, including some by local legislators, that were critical of India’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as cases of COVID-19 again hit a world record.

Twitter has withheld some of the tweets after the legal request by the Indian government, a company spokeswoman told the Reuters news agency on Saturday.

The government made an emergency order to censor the tweets, Twitter disclosed on Lumen database, a Harvard University project.

In the government’s legal request, dated April 23 and disclosed on Lumen, 21 tweets were mentioned.

Among them were tweets from a legislator named Revnath Reddy, a minister in the state of West Bengal named Moloy Ghatak and a filmmaker named Avinash Das.

The law cited in the government’s request was the Information Technology Act, 2000.

While it was not clear which section of the law had been invoked in this case, New Delhi typically uses a clause that empowers it to order blocking of public access to information in a bid to protect “sovereignty and integrity of India” and maintain public order, among other things.

“When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law,” the Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

“If the content violates Twitter’s rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only,” she said.