Karnataka High Court rejects Twitter plea against govt blocking orders

Social media giant fined Rs 50 lakh; firm had difficulty acknowledging sovereignty of Indian law, says Chandrasekhar

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The Karnataka High Court (HC) on Friday dismissed Twitter's plea against the central government’s orders to take down content and block accounts on the microblogging platform, and fined it Rs. 50 lakh citing its conduct.

Justice Krishna S Dixit said in his order that Twitter has ‘demonstrably adopted a tactical approach to delay compliance and that shows its intent to remain non-compliant to Indian law’.
 

Twitter had appealed in the HC against 10 blocking orders by the Centre for taking down 39 URLs between February 2021 and February 2022.
 

“The non-compliance with section 69A orders has the potential to make the tweet more viral and spread to other platforms as well. One can imagine the damage potential when such objectionable tweets are allowed to be disseminated despite interdiction. The damage potential is directly proportional to the delay brooked in the compliance of such orders,” the court said.
 

Under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, the Centre or its agency can ask intermediaries (in this case Twitter) to block any content from public access. The court said that Twitter had offered no plausible explanation for the delay in approaching the court, after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MeitY) had issued compliance requirement notice way back in February 2, 2021 threatening: “It needs to be mentioned that Section 69A(3) provides for specific penal consequences in case of non-compliance of the directions issued under section 69A of the Act.”
 

The penalty prescribed u/s 69A(3) for the offence of non-compliance of the order is imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years and/or fine.
 

The court said even this notice did not deter the microblogging platform and the Centre still ‘did not choose to prosecute the petitioner for the offence in question’.
 

Reacting to the development, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT said on Friday that the social media giant repeatedly violated Indian laws and hesitated to remove misinformation on the platform when former CEO Jack Dorsey led the company.
 

“Twitter, under Dorsey’s regime, exhibited partisan behaviour by hesitating to remove misinformation from the platform in India, despite doing so when similar events occurred in the USA”, the minister said, welcoming the Karnataka HCs ruling. The minister added, the High Court’s dismissal of Twitter’s plea is evidence that Jack Dorsey’s Twitter regime had difficulty acknowledging the sovereignty of Indian law.”