With India’s coronavirus pandemic spiraling out of control, the country’s government is cracking down on social media. On Thursday, the Indian government ordered Twitter to block more than 50 tweets criticizing how it dealt with the pandemic. Twitter agreed and prevented people in the country from seeing the posts of anyone who included a minister of state, an opposition member of the Indian parliament, filmmakers, an actor, two journalists and several ordinary people.
On Saturday, Twitter posted details of the contract in the Lumen database, a Harvard University project that tracks government communications around the world about the removal of information. The news was first published by the Indian technology policy website Medianama.
“When we receive a valid legal request, we will review it against both Twitter rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter’s rules, the content will be removed from the service, ”a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “If it is found to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction but not in violation of Twitter rules, we can only deny access to the content in India.” The company said it had notified the people whose tweets were restricted in India in advance, telling them that the company was responding to an order from the Indian government.
India’s IT ministry did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.
One of the restricted tweets belongs to Moloy Ghatak, a party minister for the All India Trinamool Congress from West Bengal state, where Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently held massive election campaigns despite hundreds of thousands of Indians testing positive for COVID-19 every day.
Ghatak’s tweet criticized Modi for mismanaging the pandemic.
The government also restricted dozens of tweets criticizing Modi or sharing pictures of India’s overcrowded crematoria and hospitals, as well as a tweet from the Indian American Muslim Council, a Washington DC-based advocacy group for Indian-American Muslims. This group shared a vice-story about the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage attended by hundreds of thousands of Indians earlier this month and which turned into a super-spreader event.
“With hundreds of thousands of Covid patients literally gasping for breath, the government’s willingness to pressure Twitter to block tweets critical to managing the crisis shows that the government’s moral compass continues to point in a direction that is shamelessly selfish, “the government said the Indian American Muslim Council said in a statement.
BuzzFeed News has contacted Ghatak for a comment.
Earlier this year, India’s coronavirus cases collapsed and most parts of the country resumed normal lives. At the beginning of March, the Indian health minister declared that the country was in the “final” of the pandemic. But the country is now in a second wave, triggered by a new variant of the virus, religious gatherings, and election campaigns. India currently has the highest number of daily infections in the world and its healthcare system has collapsed. Medical oxygen is scarce, ventilators are difficult to find, and vaccines are running low. India had 346,786 new cases and 2,624 deaths as of Friday, according to John Hopkins.
Despite the numbers, Modi continued to hold massive election campaigns.
This is not the first time Twitter has followed the Government of India’s instructions to censor tweets. In February, the company blocked more than 250 accounts in India criticizing the government’s handling of protests by hundreds of thousands of farmers against new agricultural laws. The company then struck defiantly and unblocked accounts of journalists, activists and politicians, despite the Indian government threatening to be in jail.
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