‘Incorrect evidence’ by Twitter: Govt to HC

Denying all assertions made by Twitter in its legal action, the Centre said that the platform’s petition is not maintainable as it is a foreign registered body and it cannot seek to defend Article 19 (right to disseminate information of speech of other citizens), Article 14 (equality before the law)  or Article 21 (protection of life and personal liberty) of the Constitution like “citizens of India” or “natural persons”, according to a source aware of the government’s filing with the Karnataka HC. The Centre has also contended that the remedy of filing a petition, as provided under Article 226 or 32 of the Constitution, is not available to a “foreign commercial entity”.

The government’s objections come in response to Twitter’s lawsuit filed last month against some of the blocking orders by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY). The company had moved the high court and called for overturning of 39 links specified by the MeitY to be blocked under Section 69 (A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The platform has claimed that these orders are procedurally and substantively deficient under Section 69 (A) of the Act.

However, in its statement of objections filed on Thursday, the Centre is learnt to have accused Twitter of submitting “incorrect evidence” to the court, and said that the evidence of the blocking orders that the company submitted is different from what the government had flagged. It has presented details on these facts to the court in a sealed cover.

The government has also said that Twitter has been a “habitual non-compliant platform for several years”. Justifying the need to issue blocking orders, it said that hate content has been on the rise in the online space, including on Twitter and that it is the company’s “failure” to not prevent misinformation on its platform.

Twitter did not respond to an immediate request for comment until publication. The next date of hearing in the case is September 8.

The Centre said that it is not for a social media intermediary like Twitter to define what free speech is and what content will cause national security or public order issues. “When a public order issue arises, it is the government that is responsible to take action and not the platform. Hence, whether content will cause national security or public order issues or not should not be allowed to be determined by the platforms,” the government said.

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On Twitter’s claim that the government has not issued notices to individuals before ordering a takedown of content posted by them, the government has said that a majority of the blocking orders are related to national security and public order issues. “Examples of such contents include Anti-India, or seditious or any religious contents that have potential to incite violence and contents that affect communal harmony in the country … It is not desirable to issue notice to such users about the proposed action. Informing the user by notice will only cause more harm,” the Centre is learnt to have said in its filing.

On several occasions, the government in its filing has mentioned that the content or accounts it ordered to block belonged to unverified and anonymous users, which could also potentially be bots. It is worth noting that the prevalence of bots on Twitter is also among the key issues that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has cited in his response to Twitter’s lawsuit against him in the United States for wanting to pull out of his $44-billion bid to buy the company.

The government said Twitter is “known to deploy the use of bots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and also permit creation of anonymous accounts in a matter of seconds”. It added that such bots can create new content “that can be more vicious than the original misinformation content thus ensuring viral spread of misinformation content”.