Twitter said on Tuesday it had sued the Indian government, escalating the social media company’s fight in the country as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks more control over critical online posts.
Twitter’s lawsuit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenges a recent order by the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. Twitter complied with the order, which had a Monday deadline, but then sought judicial relief. No date has been set for a judge to hear Twitter’s lawsuit.
The lawsuit is the first legal challenge the company has mounted to challenge laws passed in 2021 that expanded the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing authorities to require Indian users to delete posts or accounts critical of them. Company executives may face criminal penalties if they do not comply.
The laws have been met with an outcry from Twitter and other social media platforms, which see India as a crucial part of their long-term growth plans. The companies have argued that India’s rules allow the government to broadly censor its critics and that they erode security measures such as encryption. But Indian officials have said the law is needed to combat online disinformation.
Twitter is not seeking to overturn the laws, but argues in its lawsuit that the government interpreted those laws too broadly, said a person with knowledge of the filing, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The Indian government asked Twitter on Tuesday to follow the rules. “It is everyone’s responsibility to obey the laws passed by the country’s parliament,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, the electronics and information technology minister, told a press conference.
Mr. Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for several years to erode the power of tech companies and more tightly control what is said online, using new information technology laws to suppress dissent. For example, Twitter has been told to remove content related to civil liberties complaints, protests, press freedoms and criticism of the government’s handling of the pandemic. WhatsApp was told it would be required to “trace” people’s private messages to government agencies upon request.
In addition, the new rules required social media companies to hire executives based in India to ensure companies complied with government requests to remove content and block accounts. If these actions did not occur, the leaders could be held criminally responsible and could face prison sentences of up to seven years.
Twitter previously criticized the government’s tactics and called on it to respect freedom of expression. The company said India’s laws are being used “arbitrarily and disproportionately” against the company and its users, many of whom are journalists, opposition politicians and non-profit groups.
Twitter’s lawsuit follows legal action last year by WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Meta, against the country’s new laws. WhatsApp asked the Delhi High Court to block the applicability of the rule that dictates users’ messages be traceable. In relation to the WhatsApp case, the government has said that the right to privacy is not “absolute” and that it is “subject to reasonable restrictions”.
That case is pending.
Twitter has sued governments in the past to protect anonymous users or oppose censorship. In 2014, the company sued the United States, alleging that the government impeded Twitter’s free speech rights by blocking the company from disclosing information related to surveillance. This lawsuit was dismissed in 2020.
In 2017, Twitter again sued the United States to block the government from unmasking an anonymous account that criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The government dropped its request after Twitter filed its lawsuit.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, which is in the process of buying Twitter for $44 billion, has said the company should relax its content moderation policies and allow tweets to stay on the platform unless violate local laws.
Twitter’s lawsuit against the Indian government is part of a widening battle between the biggest tech companies and governments around the world over who has the upper hand. Australia and the European Union have drafted or passed laws to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other companies over online speech, while other countries are trying to curb the companies’ services to stifle dissent and quell protests.
Experts said the Indian government’s move to force Twitter to block accounts and posts amounted to censorship, at a time when the government is accused of weaponizing a loose definition of content it finds offensive to go after critics.
In February 2021, Twitter permanently blocked more than 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory comments about Mr. Modi. Twitter said at the time that it was not taking any action against the accounts of journalists, politicians and activists, saying it did not believe the orders to block them “are consistent with Indian law”.
In May 2021, police in India raided Twitter’s offices after the company decided to label tweets by politicians from Mr Modi’s party as “manipulated media”. Those tweets attacked members of the opposition who had used the platform to criticize Mr Modi and what they called his government’s obstructive response to the pandemic.
And in recent weeks, police in New Delhi arrested Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of a prominent fact-checking website, for a 2018 tweet sharing an image from an old Bollywood film. The government said the image was causing communal disharmony after a Twitter account with few followers and only one tweet complained about it and tagged the Delhi Police. That account disappeared soon after.
Last week, Twitter was ordered to block tweets by Freedom House, a US nonprofit that cited India as an example of a country where press freedom was in decline.
“This shows how an international report ranking India’s press freedom responds with censorship rather than debate and discussion,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “It is an undemocratic and authoritarian response.”
Lawyers and technology experts said Twitter and other social media companies were caught between a rock and a hard place. They are required to respect the laws of the land, but they are also challenged to maintain freedom of speech in the world’s largest democracy.
“I think they’re fighting a losing battle because, on the one hand, they’re taking the government to court, but on the other hand, they tend to give in,” said Salman Waris, a lawyer at TechLegis in New Delhi. who specializes in international technology law.
Mujib Mashal contributed to the reporting.
