Police searched the Delhi office of the social media company Twitter after its moderators labelled a tweet by the spokesperson of the governing party as potentially misleading. Television images showed a team of anti-terrorism police carrying out the search after receiving a complaint about the tweet. “Delhi Police is inquiring into a complaint in which a clarification is sought from Twitter,” said the police in a statement.
On May 18, Sambit Patra, national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata party, tweeted screenshots of a “toolkit”, or briefing notes, allegedly used by the Congress party to discredit Narendra Modi, the prime minister, and his government over their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The Congress party claimed that the toolkit was fake and Twitter subsequently labelled the tweet as “manipulated media”.
The government then asked Twitter to remove the tag. Police invited Twitter’s India managing director, Manish Maheshwari, to present himself as part of a “preliminary inquiry pertaining to the toolkit” and to bring “all the relevant documents”. The same day, India’s IT ministry issued an advisory directing social media companies to curb false news by removing “all the content that names, refers to, or implies ‘Indian variant’ of coronavirus from your platform immediately”. So far, Twitter does not appear to have removed such content. Twitter in India declined to comment on the search.
The manipulated media tag investigation follows a flare-up between India’s government and Twitter this year over controversial tweets about widespread farmers’ protests. Twitter had refused to block accounts critical of New Delhi’s agricultural reforms, which had led to protests across the country.
In February, India announced new social media rules designed to give the authorities greater power to take down posts they deemed offensive. Officials said the legislation was designed to make companies “more responsible, more accountable” to the law in India, but privacy experts warned that the government was working to give itself more power and crack down on dissent.
