The Indian government has declared that Twitter has lost its intermediary status in the country for failing to uphold its recently re-structured content moderation policies. The social media platform has been in hot water with India for a while now, and this appears to be the culmination of several earlier slights.
India vs Twitter: final round
Now, that’s not set in stone just yet. The courts in India still need to decide on the ultimate outcome of the bout, but that appears to be where this particular contest is heading.
The conversation in the Delhi High court is concerned with Twitter’s failure to comply with India’s new content policies on several fronts. Particularly with regards to appointing a chief compliance officer, a grievance officer, and a nodal officer meant to handle requests from law-enforcement — all of which Twitter India has failed to appoint.
Should courts rule that Twitter’s safe-harbour status is now null and void, then the platform and its employees will be held liable for posted content that violates the government’s content policies.
One such employee who has already been held responsible for content posted on the platform is Manish Maheshwari, head of Twitter India. Maheshwari was recently ordered to appear before the Ghaziabad police force for failing to take down several posts containing content that violates India’s content policies. Twitter was accused of provoking communal unrest.
It’s a tense situation, one that should be observed closely, and one that also raises an important question: when should a company operating on an international scale bow to the laws of a particular land? Particularly when said company exists primarily in the vast, lawless virtual wilderness known as the internet.
Source: The Next Web