14 highlights
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Three separate incidents deserve your attention.
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One. Yesterday, the Delhi High Court hauled up Twitter for not complying with India’s new information and technology rules and failing to appoint a grievance redressal officer.
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The second incident: Some 2,000 km away from the action in the Delhi High Court, the Karnataka High Court, which was hearing another matter about Twitter, gave the Uttar Pradesh police a dressing down.
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Over to the third incident. A little over a week ago, almost every significant news media publication reported that Twitter’s interim grievance officer Dharmendra Chatur quit from his position within weeks of his appointment.
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Except, contrary to what was reported, Chatur didn’t actually resign. That’s because he was never even appointed, not formally.
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Here is what happened. Chatur works at law firm Poovayya & Co., which does a lot of legal work for Twitter. As the company was under pressure to appoint a grievance officer, Chatur was simply being considered for the position. But meanwhile, Twitter put his name up on the site as an interim grievance redressal officer, which remained up for weeks.
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A few weeks later when Chatur withdrew his candidature—given the government and public scrutiny involved with the job, not to mention the liability, who wouldn’t have?—it was seen as a resignation.
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“But what Twitter has been doing is also quite unpredictable,” says an executive at one of the larger tech firms, speaking on condition of anonymity. While operating in a foreign country, the norm is either you follow the regulation that has been put in place or you challenge it. Or you leave the country. Twitter has done neither.
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Google and Facebook both announced the appointment of grievance redressal officers last month, and both companies have released interim compliance reports (mandated every month) earlier this month (Twitter hasn’t yet)
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There are two notable entities in play: Twitter Inc., which is a US-based company, and Twitter Communications India Pvt. Ltd, which is its India subsidiary. The latter has absolutely no control over the content on Twitter; what it mostly does is act as reseller or distributor of sorts for Twitter’s services (mainly advertising)
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The Indian entity’s job is limited to research and development, and marketing and promotions. It has no control over the content. Twitter India and Maheshwari, legally speaking, have nothing to do with the social media platform itself, or with the IT Rules and the intermediary guidelines therein.
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The IT Rules in large part are an attempt to change that. The appointment of resident executives means that the government would have someone to go after every time it has a problem with social media.
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The government’s stance is clear. It wants Twitter to comply. It has already said that, following a failure to comply, Twitter no longer merits protections as an intermediary platform. That is, Twitter can be held responsible for the content posted on it by anyone.
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The apprehension all along has been that if Twitter complies with the IT Rules in India, that opens a big can of worms for the company in the countries already looking to control content and narrative. A good example of this is Nigeria, where Twitter has been banned since a month after the latter deleted a controversial tweet by the country’s president for violating its policies. (Fun fact: Indian Twitter alternative Koo has been launched in Nigeria and many in the Nigerian government have joined the platform.)