India urges Twitter to remove tweets critical of COVID manipulation from Censorship News

Twitter is holding back some posts, including those made by lawmakers, after the Indian government issued an emergency order.

The Indian government called on the social networking platform Twitter to remove dozens of tweets, including from local lawmakers, who criticized how India handled the outbreak of the coronavirus, as COVID-19 cases once again set a world record.

Twitter has retained some tweets following a legal request from the Indian government, a company spokesman told Reuters news agency on Saturday.

The government issued an emergency order to censor tweets, which Twitter reported in the Lumen database, a Harvard University project.

In the government’s legal request, dated April 23 and when Lumen was released, 21 tweets were mentioned.

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

The law mentioned in the government’s request was the Information Technology Act of 2000.

Although it was unclear which part of the law was used in this case, New Delhi typically uses a clause ordering the protection of “sovereignty and integrity of India” and the blocking of public access to information in order to maintain public order. , among other things.

“When we receive a valid legal request, we review it in accordance with Twitter Rules and local law,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed note.

“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 if we do not violate Twitter’s rules, we can only withhold access to Indian content,” he said.

The spokesman confirmed that Twitter had informed the account holders directly in addition to retaining their content, and informed them that it had received a legal order regarding the tweets.

India’s IT ministry told AFP that it had asked Twitter to remove 100 posts, adding that “certain users have misused social media platforms to spread false or misleading information and create panic about India’s COVID-19 situation”.

The development was previously reported by tech news website TechCrunch, which said Twitter was not the only platform affected by the order.

Destructive climb

India is immersed in the second strongest wave of the pandemic, with a COVID-19 death rate in less than four minutes in New Delhi due to the ears of the capital’s underfunding health system.

Criticism is mounting that the federal government of Narendra Modi and the state authorities were not sufficiently prepared to deal with the crisis.

Health experts said India had been satisfied a few months earlier when new cases appeared to be around 10,000 a day and seemed to be under control.

Authorities overturned the restrictions, allowing large rallies to resume, including major festivities and political rallies for local elections.

India’s health care system has made great efforts to deal with the huge rise, and families of patients have sought help on social media as the country has suffered severe shortages of medicines and oxygen.

India reported 349,691 new cases and 2,767 deaths in the last 24 hours on Sunday – the highest since the pandemic began.