NEW DELHI: 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.
According to Medianama, those whose posts were removed include Revanth Reddy, a Congress MP; Moloy Ghatak, a Bengal minister; actor Vineet Kumar Singh; and filmmakers, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das.
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”.