On Saturday, Twitter has blocked several tweets made by some popular handles, including handles belonging to Member of Parliament Revanth Reddy, West Bengal Minister Moloy Ghatak, actor Vineet Kumar Singh, and filmmakers Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of India’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as cases of COVID-19 again hit a world record. After the central government sent a notice to the company saying that these tweets were not in compliance with India’s IT law.
The government made an emergency order to censor the tweets, Twitter disclosed on Lumen database, a Harvard University project.
“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.
The spokeswoman confirmed that Twitter had notified account holders directly about withholding their content and let them know that it received a legal order pertaining to their tweets.
The development was reported earlier by technology news website TechCrunch, which said that Twitter was not the only platform affected by the order.
Overwhelmed hospitals in India begged for oxygen supplies on Saturday as the country’s coronavirus infections have soared in what the Delhi high court called a “tsunami,” setting a world record for cases for a third consecutive day.
India is in the grip of a rampaging second wave of the pandemic, hitting a rate of one COVID-19 death in just under every four minutes in Delhi as the capital’s underfunded health system buckles.
