The dispute between Twitter and the government has now reached its peak. An FIR was lodged against IT and Electronics Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, hours after Twitter suffered the consequences for not following the intermediary rules. In Ghaziabad, the police have lodged an FIR against nine people, including Twitter India and two Congress leaders. On Wednesday itself, Ravi Shankar Prasad said in one tweet after another that Twitter presents itself as a ‘flag-bearer of freedom of expression’, but chooses the path of not following the intermediary guidelines. However, Twitter said on Tuesday that it has appointed an Interim Chief Compliance Officer. He will soon share complete information about this officer with the Ministry of Information Technology (IT).
Twitter got security under section 79 of IT Act?
In fact, the government’s complaint is that Twitter has failed to follow the guidelines in the matter of appointment of Resident Grievance Officer, Nodal Officer and Chief Compliance Officer. This will end the protection given to Twitter as a social media intermediate under IT Act 79. This section states that if any information, data or link is shared by any third party on any intermediary platform, it will not be responsible for it. If the section 79 protection is removed from Twitter, then action can be taken against it by treating it as a content publisher. At present, the government has not officially said that Twitter has lost the protection of Section 79 of the IT Act, but the action of the Ghaziabad Police has made it clear that the government has made up its mind to take action against it. However, there have also been reports quoting sources that the government has removed the intermediary status of Twitter.
Government’s opposition to Twitter costed
On February 25, the government had issued new IT rules. Accordingly, it was made mandatory for social media platforms to appoint a grievance officer in India. According to this, if the government asks for information about any inflammatory tweet or post, then the social media platform will have to give information about the originator of that tweet or post. Apart from this, if the government asks the social media platform to remove any objectionable content, then it will have to be removed within 36 hours. Twitter had said that it is a ban on freedom of expression. Therefore, he will not accept the new IT rules. Whereas other platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram had accepted the new rules of the government. However, later Twitter also said that it was ready to follow the guidelines of the government and it has appointed an interim compliance officer.
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Ghaziabad Police made this Twitter the basis of action
Here, the Ghaziabad Police has filed an FIR assuming Twitter to be an accused of spreading fake news, it is related to the viral video related to assault and indecency with an elderly person named Abdul Samad in Loni area. Police say that an attempt was made to give a communal color to this incident in a wrong way. That is why this action was taken against Twitter India. Police has registered an FIR against Mohammad Zubair, Rana Ayub, The Wire, Salman Nizami, Maskoor Usmani, Shama Mohammad, Saba Naqvi, Twitter Communication India Pvt Ltd and Twitter INC (Twitter handle of Congress) in the case. It said that even after the matter was cleared by the police, Twitter did not take any steps to remove the wrong tweet.
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