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Indian police searched the local office of the social media company Twitter, after its moderators labeled a tweet from the government party’s national spokesman as potentially misleading.
Television footage from the ANI station on Tuesday showed a team of Delhi anti-terrorist police conducting the search after receiving a complaint about the tweet.
“Delhi police are investigating a complaint asking for clarification on Twitter,” police said in a statement ceded to local station NDTV.
On May 18, Sambit Patra, national spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata party, tweeted screenshots of a “toolkit” or briefing notes, allegedly used by the opposition party in the Indian National Congress to discredit Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government’s management of the coronavirus pandemic. .
The Congress party claimed the toolkit was fake and subsequently Twitter labeled the tweet as “manipulated media” on Thursday.
The government asked Twitter to remove the label. On Friday, police invited Twitter’s managing director in India, Manish Maheshwari, to present himself as part of a “preliminary investigation into the toolkit” and to bring “all relevant documents”.
The same day, India’s IT ministry issued an advice directing social media companies to curb fake news by immediately removing from your platform “all content that names, references or involves” an Indian variant “of the coronavirus”. So far, it appears that Twitter has not removed this content.
A Twitter spokesman in India declined to comment on the search.
The manipulated investigation of the media label comes after a rift between the Indian government and Twitter earlier this year over controversial tweets about farmers ’protests.
Twitter had refused to block accounts that criticized New Delhi’s agricultural reforms and sparked massive protests across the country. In February, India announced sweep away new social media rules designed to give authorities more power to remove sites they deem offensive.
Officials said the legislation was designed to make companies “more accountable and accountable” to the law in India, but privacy experts warned the government was working to empower itself and crack down on dissent.
“For India to do this is a major escalation, it is being done to pressure Twitter, but also other companies and technology platforms,” said Raman Chima, Asian political director of Access Now, a nonprofit group that advocates digital rights.
“It is not normal for the Delhi special police cell to be taking on technology-related issues,” Chima said. “There is no case to justify a police visit to the Indian subsidiary of a global company.”
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