Twitter announced on Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government, the latest development in the legal battle between the social media company and the country's attempts to ban its content.
The action comes after Indian authorities ordered the social media company to remove a series of accounts and posts that violate the country's obscenity and defamation laws. While Twitter opted to remove the posts, it has also started to seek judicial protection from such orders in the future.
Twitter vs Indian Government
The tense legal battle between the two sides began last May when India issued new IT rules for online content. This was shortly followed by a police raid on Twitter's India offices and regulators threatening to hold the company liable for any future infractions by its users.
However, the social media company has long argued that it complies with local laws concerning speech. But Indian laws concerning obscenity and seditious speech are unusually aggressive compared to other legislation.
The country has, in the past, used speech laws to stifle environmental concerns or broader discussion of internal political strife. Prominent author Arundhati Roy, who faced sedition charges for statements about the conflict in Kashmir, described the system as both chaotic and repressive, as per The Verge.
"The most frightening thing is that any mad coot can go and lodge a complaint against you. It's a serious amount of harassment," said Roy at the time. Twitter's legal battle with the Indian government is made even more complicated by ongoing confusion about Elon Musk's plan to take the company private.
The Tesla CEO also pledged to emphasize free speech values as Twitter's new owner but also said that he would work to obey local laws. He hinted at enforcing staff cuts that would make it more difficult to effectively defend the company's position in India.
According to TechCrunch, Twitter alleged that New Delhi threatened to open criminal proceedings against its chief compliance officer in India if he did not comply with orders. The lawsuit comes after a year and a half from the start of the legal battle.
New Local Laws
Many believe that the Indian government's attempts to take down social media posts were objectionable only because they denounced its policies and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. a spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment on the matter amid ongoing legal issues.
Twitter officials considered the police raid on its India offices as a form of "intimidation" by the government. They said that the company has "concerns with regard to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global Terms of Service, as well as with core elements of the new IT Rules."
During a news conference, India's minister of electronics and information technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said that it was everyone's responsibility to abide by the laws passed by the nation's Parliament.
For several years, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have worked to corral the power of the tech companies and to strictly police everything that is published online. They have used the new information technology laws to clamp down on dissent, the New York Times reported.
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