Twitter suspends several high-profile accounts amid farm protests

Twitter on Monday suspended several accounts of high-profile celebrities and organisations, including actor Sushant Singh, Caravan magazine, Kisan Ekta Morcha, Tractor2twitr and several other politicians, farmer leaders, writers and activists, at the behest of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for spreading misinformation during the farmers' protests.

The IT ministry and law enforcement agencies had last week ordered Twitter to block these tweets and accounts under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.

According to Twitter, the company blocked these accounts in the interim in response to a valid legal request from the MeitY pending discussions with them.

A Twitter spokesperson said that many countries have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account content.

"In our continuing effort to make our services available to people everywhere, if we receive a properly scoped request from an authorised entity, it may be necessary to withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time," the micro-blogging platform said in a statement.

Transparency is vital to protecting freedom of expression, so we have a notice policy for withheld content. Upon receipt of requests to withhold content, we will promptly notify the affected account holders (unless we are prohibited from doing so e.g. if we receive a court order under seal)," the company informed.

Twitter last week said it suspended more than 300 accounts engaged in spam and platform manipulation as the farmers' tractor rally went violent in the national capital on the 72nd Republic Day.

A government official said the Home Affairs Ministry had demanded the suspension of “close to 250 Twitter accounts” that were allegedly posting content that sought to foment violence.

“The order was issued against accounts that were using the hashtag #modiplanningfarmersgenocide that started on Jan. 30,” the government source said.

“Genocide incitement is a public offence and a great threat to public order,” said the official, who asked not to be named as he was not authorised to publicly discuss the matter.

The farmers swarmed the Red Fort and waved farmer union flags from its ramparts. They even hoisted farmer union flags as well as a pennant with a Sikh religious symbol from a flagpole.

A Twitter spokesperson had told IANS that the company has taken strong enforcement action to protect the conversation on the service from attempts to incite violence, abuse and threats that could trigger the risk of offline harm by blocking certain terms that violate our rules for trends.

"Using a combination of technology and human review, Twitter worked at scale and took action on hundreds of Tweets that have been in violation of the Twitter Rules and suspended more than 300 accounts engaged in spam and platform manipulation," the spokesperson informed.

The Delhi Police had warned that 308 Twitter handles have been generated to create confusion over the tractor rally proposed by protesting farmers on Republic Day.

Vinod Jose, editorial director of The Caravan magazine, whose official Twitter account had a following of more than 280,000 and had tweeted reporting on the farmers’ protests, was also blocked along with the accounts of many farm leaders and protest supporters.

Jose told Reuters that Caravan had received no word from Twitter on the account suspension. “This is akin to censorship. Twitter’s act follows multiple cases of sedition filed against Caravan editors for covering the farmers protests,” he said.

The suspended accounts include popular reports by agitating farmers keen to build public momentum for their campaign.