Committed To Freedom Of Expression: US in the midst of the Twitter Row in our country India

US repeats its commitments with regard to Twitter blocking 500 accounts; Learn more…

Thursday, 11th February 2021

The US repeated its commitment towards supporting the democratic values that included the Freedom of Expression while making comments on the blocking of about 500 accounts by the social media platform Twitter. That step was taken by Twitter to post the receipt of orders from the government of India.

"What I would say generally, is that around the world, we are committed to supporting democratic values including freedom of expression. I think when it comes to Twitter's policies we would have to refer you to Twitter itself," stated Ned Price, spokesperson of the US Department of State when asked about his comments in the context of this situation.

This followed after the social media platform Twitter on this Wednesday has revealed that it has already undertaken several enforcement steps- including suspension of more than 500 user accounts permanently for the clear violations of the regulations of Twitter, in direct response to the Indian Government’s "legal requests".

Twitter recently said in a statement, "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."

"We took a range of enforcement actions -- including permanent suspension in certain cases -- against more than 500 accounts escalated across all Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology orders for clear violations of Twitter''s Rules," added the statement.

The company notified that they have taken the needed steps in order to lessen the visibility of hashtags bearing unfavorable content which consisted of stopping those contents from trending on the platform of Twitter.

This statement dropped in the midst of the "Toolkit" related controversy pertaining to the ongoing protest of the farmers''.

The Centre this Monday had ordered the reputed micro-blogging platform to eliminate 1,178 Pakistani-Khalistani Twitter accounts disseminating misinformation as well as provocative content related to the farmer's agitation, reported sources.

The News Talkie Bureau

Sources:

NDTV