Times of India: “Social micro-blogging platform Twitter is understood to have removed over four dozen tweets allegedly criticising the central government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic on instructions from the IT ministry. The tweets are now inaccessible to the users of the platform.”
“Officials at the IT ministry did not respond to calls on the matter. When contacted, a spokesperson for Twitter said: ‘When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter’s Rules, it will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only. In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so they’re aware that we’ve received a legal order pertaining to the account. We notify the user(s) by sending a message to the email address associated with the account(s), if available’. Twitter notifies account holders ahead of withholding content so that they’re aware that the action has been taken in response to a legal request from the Indian government.”
Unmentioned in the Times of India article is that Twitter only complied under threat of having its workforce in the country tossed in jail, effectively making them hostages to Modi’s regime.