Last week Twitter waited with bated breath for the Delhi High court’s ruling on whether or not it should be held personally liable for contentious content shared on its platform. The court ruled that yes, in fact, it should, and has left it to the Indian government to hold the micro-blogging platform directly responsible for content posted on it that violates the country’s new content policies.
Twitter now has no other options but to comply with the Indian government’s rules, and so has appointed a resident grievance officer and suspended several thousand accounts for violating India’s content policies.
Twitter concedes
Twitter has staunchly pushed back and delayed appointing a grievance officer for some time now, at odds with India’s IT rules for all social media platforms. In light of the Delhi High court ruling, it’s had to back down from this fight, and announced the appointment of its new resident grievance officer, Vinay Prakash. Prakash will now be in charge of all grievances taken up against content on Twitter in India. Good luck to him.
Additionally, the microblogging platform has revealed a compliance report, and has suspended over 18,000 accounts it found violating India’s content policy. These accounts were suspended for sharing, amongst other things, sexually explicit content involving children, nudity, and even posts promoting terrorism and inciting violence.
In a statement to TechRadar, the platform said, “In addition to the above data, we processed 56 grievances which were appealing Twitter account suspensions. These were all resolved and the appropriate responses were sent. We overturned seven of the account suspensions based on the specifics of the situation, but the other accounts remain suspended.”
This appears to be a wrap on the Twitter India saga, at least for the time being, which has been ongoing for some time now. Tensions between the government and the social media platform remain high.