BENGALURU: Karnataka High Court dismissed a plea by Twitter challenging the central government’s order for blocking certain objectionable accounts and tweets on the social media platform.
The plea by Twitter challenged the blocking orders issued to it by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.
The High Court also told Twitter that the government possessed the power to issue such blocking orders.
Additionally, the court has charged Twitter with a fine of Rs 50 lakh for its failure to comply with the order to block accounts and tweets and not citing a reason for the delay. Twitter’s petitions have been dismissed by the court.
Twitter was further instructed by the court to pay the imposed fine to legal services authority of Karnataka within a span of 45 days. Moreover, the court said a fine of Rs 5,000 per day will be imposed on the company in case they delay the payment of cost.
Justice Krishna S Dixit also remarked that Twitter is not a farmer or labourer who is not cognizant of the law, but that it is a billion-dollar company. He further said that Twitter has the freedom to argue before the court for changing the cost imposed by it.
Senior Advocates Ashok Haranahalli, Arvind Datar and Advocate Manu Kulkarni represented Twitter while Additional Solicitor General of India R Sankaranarayanan represented the Central government.
The advocates for Twitter argued that the Central government did not have the power to issue general orders which called for blocking of social media accounts. It further added that the government needs to specify the reason for blocking of social media accounts to enable Twitter to communicate such reason to users.
On the other hand, the central government claimed that Twitter was given the order with national and public interest in mind and to ensure that incidents of lynching and mob violence do not happen.
The petition by Twitter was filed to challenge ten blocking orders, which were issued by the government between February 2021 and 2022, specifically ordering Twitter to take down 39 URLs.
In recent times, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had claimed that threats were made to the social media platform of being booted out of India after not adhering to the request by the government to block certain accounts during the peak of the farmers' protest.
Twitter’s owner Elon Musk responded to this by saying that Twitter had no choice but to comply with the regulations imposed by the Indian government, saying that failure to comply with such regulations would have led to the platform being shut down. Musk further pointed out that one cannot just apply American principles universally, underlining the need for respecting and complying with the laws of each country.
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