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Journalism of Courage
Even as ex-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has raised allegations of Central government pressure and threats against the micro-blogging platform, the company has been locked in a legal battle with the government in the Karnataka High Court.
Previously, Twitter official Manish Maheshwari approached the court in 2017 against a summons by the Uttar Pradesh Police to appear in an investigation in person regarding an incident in which a video of an elderly man being assaulted was circulated on Twitter. His counsel argued that the notice was issued to him on the erroneous belief that he was a managing director, while in reality he only held that designation as a senior employee, and was not actually a managing director as defined in the Companies Act. In this case, an interim relief was granted to Maheshwari by the HC bench consisting of Justice G Narender who instructed the police to collect the information from him through virtual means.
Recently, Twitter has moved the Karnataka HC against the central government orders to block certain Twitter accounts. The government had questioned Twitter’s locus standi in the matter as a foreign company, arguing that they could not take benefit of Article 19 and Article 21. For their part, Twitter asserted that they had actually argued for these rights on the part of their users.
The government also argued that there was no “jural relationship” between Twitter and its users as the social media platform was supposed to act as a mere intermediary. The gravity of tweets affecting the integrity of the country was also a line of argument, with the central government counsel A S G Sankaranarayan arguing that the controversial tweets included referencing “Indian Occupied Kashmir” and the survival of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Twitter, in turn, argued that even as a foreign entity they had certain rights under Article 14 of the Constitution ie; right to equality. It also said that the government did not provide a reason for blocking the account in each case. It argued that the provision for blocking a URL under Section 69a should not amount to the whole account but only the offending URL, since then the whole account would be barred from creating information, whereas the section only referred to information already created.
The judgment has since been reserved by the single judge bench consisting of Justice Krishna Dixit. The final order is awaited.
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