Ban Twitter Trends After MeitY Disapproves Social Media Platform’s Blog

Ban Twitter has been trending on the social media platform after talks between the American microblogging and social networking service and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India went awry. Meity has expressed its disapproval of Twitter posting a blog amidst talks with the Indian Government.

“Upon the request of Twitter seeking a meeting with the Government, the Secretary IT was to engage with senior management of Twitter. In this light a blog post published prior to this engagement is unusual. Govt. will share its response soon,” tweeted MeitY. Twitter, earlier today, posted a blog on being served with a non-compliance notice by the Government of India.

“Separate to our enforcement under the Twitter Rules, over the course of the last 10 days, Twitter has been served with several separate blocking orders by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. Out of these, two were emergency blocking orders that we temporarily complied with but subsequently restored access to the content in a manner that we believe was consistent with Indian law. After we communicated this to MeitY, we were served with a non-compliance notice,” said the Twitter blog post along with the list of actions that were taken by the social media platform.

The platform added that some of the accounts identified in the blocking orders under the “Country Withheld Content policy” were only blocked in India, and continue to be available outside “We’ve made it clear, around the world, that we strongly believe that the Tweets must flow,” said Twitter while adding that accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians have not been blocked, and options available under the Indian Laws are being explored.

MeitY had in the last week of January asked the micro-blogging site to block 257 URLs and one hashtag under the relevant provision of the law as they were "spreading misinformation about (farmer) protests and has the potential to lead to imminent violence affecting public order situation in the country. The Government of India has also been heavily advocating the use of Koo, an Indian blogging site similar to Twitter.