India tops list of nations seeking blocking scribe, news co tweets

[GS Paper 3 – IT, Social Media]

Context – In the backdrop of the legal face-off between Twitter and the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY), the social media platform said that the government issued the highest number of legal demands to block content posted by verified journalists and news outlets on the platform during July-December last year.

Key Highlights

• In its latest transparency report, Twitter also noted that India was second in asking the platform users’ information and was among the top five countries to issue content-blocking orders to Twitter in the reporting timeframe for all kinds of users.
• The micro-blogging website noted that in the last six months of 2021, it received 326 legal demands to block content posted by accounts of verified journalists and news companies, of which 114 came from India, accounting for over a third of total blocking requests.
  
• Nations like Turkey, Russia and Pakistan made up the top four along with India in issuing such demands to Twitter.
• In the previous reporting period as well — January-June 2021 —  India had topped this list. In that timeframe, India had made 89 of the total 231 such demands the platform received globally.
• Twitter filed a lawsuit earlier this month against some of the content and account blocking orders issued to it by MeitY under Section 69 (A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, between February 2021 and 2022.
• Twitter also received the second highest number of government legal requests for providing account information of users from India, after the United States. Various law enforcement and government agencies in India sent Twitter 2,211 such requests, out of the total 11,460 requests it received globally. 
• Apart from that, India was also at the fifth place in terms of sending legal requests — from the government and various courts — to Twitter to remove content from its platform during July-December 2021.

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