A senior lawyer on Monday moved the Delhi High Court seeking directions to the Centre to lay down guidelines under the Information Technology (IT) Act to ensure that censorship on social media is carried out in accordance with the Constitution.
Senior advocate Sanjay R Hegde moved the plea as his account on Twitter was permanently suspended by the social media platform on November 5 allegedly in connection with two re-tweets by him.
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The petition, which also seeks restoration of his Twitter account, is listed for hearing before Justice Navin Chawla on Tuesday.
In his plea, filed through advocate Pranjal Kishore, Hegde questioned whether large multi-national corporations, like Twitter, are amenable to constitutional scrutiny for their actions.
According to his petition, the first of the two posts pertained to a tweet by Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA) and member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML), who had posted Gorakh Pandey's poem 'Unko phaansi de do' on her Twitter profile.
Hegde had re-tweeted and shared Krishnan's post with the caption 'Hang Him', an English translation of the poem's title, the petition said.
The second post was a picture of August Landmesser which Hegde was using as his profile header/cover photo for over a year, it said.
It said, "The photograph in question was taken on June 13, 1936 and shows a large gathering of workers at the Blohm Voss shipyard in Hamburg. Almost everyone in the image has raised his arm in the Nazi salute. The only exception is Landmesser, who stands toward the back of the crowd, with his arms crossed over his chest."
The petition states that Hegde's account was suspended purportedly for the use of the two posts whose original tweeters have faced no action.
The petition contends that suspension of Hegde's Twitter account "is illegal, arbitrary and contrary to the Respondent No.2's (Twitter) own terms of use and rules" and also violates his right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under the Constitution.
"The arbitrariness of Respondent No.2's conduct is clear from the fact that while the petitioner's account was suspended for sharing a post/tweet by another user, no action has been taken against the user who wrote the original tweet. The same continues to be in public domain," it said and added that no action has been taken against those who had subsequently, shared the poem and photograph on their twitter profiles.
The petition said that before coming to court Hegde had followed the internal appeals procedure of Twitter, but his appeal was rejected. He had also served a legal notice on the social media platform, but no response was received to the same, it said.
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