Conflicts of this type will inevitably recur and intensify in the coming years. The case pits authorities in the planet’s second most populous country, which are concerned about online criticism, against a Californian microblogging platform with a market capitalization said to exceed $40 billion that wants to keep its operations secret of its algorithms.
It intensified last week when Twitter approached a court in the southern city of Bangalore challenge Content removal orders issued by New Delhi as “broad and arbitrary” and conducive to “disproportionate” censorship.
On the same day, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, also known as MeitY, formally revoked Twitter’s status as an Internet intermediary, which had given it immunity from liability for content posted by its 230 million users. his in India.
Neither the state nor profit
This decision followed a statement by MeitY in late June giving Twitter “a last chance” to comply with requests to remove content — content considered by some to be hate speech. Twitter was not respected.
“A fundamental issue is at stake in the dispute between India and Twitter,” said Daniel Bastard, head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific bureau. “It is about ensuring freely reported and reliable information, which is regulated according to open and transparent principles. It is clearly not the job of a government to decide what its citizens can or cannot say in the public sphere. And it is equally unfortunate that, for the sake of greater profits, a multinational company allows its algorithms to give some extreme content more importance than safe and verified information. Civil society must return to the center of these concerns, as RSF does in the tools it has developed to combat information chaos.”
MeitY moved against Twitter under its “IT Rules”, a set of digital regulations passed in 2021 that are is often used to order online platforms to remove content the government doesn’t like, such as contents related to situation in Kashmir or the massive farmers’ protests in northern India in 2020 and 2021.
The dangers of censorship
government recently announced that it wanted to make these rules even tougher, including the creation of government-appointed “Complaints Appeals Commissions” to address “complaints” and require the removal of offensive content. In response to MeitY’s request for feedback from stakeholders in a “public consultation,” Forum on Information and Democracy — a branch of the RSF — submitted its recommendations on July 6, a day after the dispute between Twitter and New Delhi came to a head.
Forum feedback highlighted the risk of outright censorship that would result from the proposed MeitY reforms in their current form, as content could be removed within 72 hours without reason and no possibility of appeal.
The Forum also expressed concern over the failure to ensure that the members of the Complaints Appeal Commissions are independent, saying that they should be appointed on the basis of competence and not on the basis of political criteria. Oversight by a parliamentary commission made up of representatives of the ruling and opposition parties would help ensure that the Complaints Appeal Commissions were independent, the Forum added.
Self-assessment, transparency and accountability
Regarding Twitter and its commercial concerns, RSF has created a self-regulatory ecosystem for the digital universe and online platforms in the form of Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI). This is an unprecedented transparency tool that aims to promote reliable online journalism through mechanisms for media self-evaluation and to enable news outlets to hold social media accountable for the quality of their journalism, including their research and fact-checking.
By integrating JTI’s principles into its algorithms, Twitter would have a credible answer to offer governments like India’s and serve as a global guide, advocating healthy content regulation based on transparency and accountability.
