Twitter to restructure its India team

After a nudge from the government, Twitter is set to restructure its India team and assign more senior executives to the company’s local offices. Word is that executives of the microblogging platform have agreed to structural changes at a meeting with officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)

Senior government officials told The Indian Express that the ministry pushed for these changes as part of its effort to better manage communications between the Government of India and the platform’s global team. The MeitY, exercising its powers under Section 69 of the IT Act, had passed an emergency order asking the global platform to block 257 accounts. In its notice, the ministry said that these handles were spreading misinformation about the farmers protest which had the potential to lead to imminent violence affecting public order situation in the country.

The government had raised multiple concerns on Twitter’s failure to comply with its orders. Officials highlighted that the most objectionable was the social media company’s lack of willingness to act on multiple posts that used the word “genocide”, regarding the handling of the ongoing farmer protests. A senior IT Ministry official, who had attended the meeting, said a term genocide cannot be casually thrown around. “Most of the tweets that we flagged on January 31 to Twitter had a mention of the word along with provocative images, which had nothing to do with India.” The official said Twitter’s failure to act upon it was like sitting on a tinderbox waiting to explode.

Another official said the platform cannot be the judge, jury and executioner of what it thinks its interpretation of the Indian laws is. “If they had a problem with the notices we sent, there are adequate redressal mechanisms for that,” he pointed out. “A deep sense of disappointment at seeing Twitter side not with “freedom of expression”, but rather with those who seek to abuse such freedom and provoke disturbance to public order, was conveyed to the company’s representatives,” the ministry said.

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Twitter executives, at the meeting, had informed the ministry that they had taken action on about 95 per cent of the content and accounts flagged by the officials, and that they would verify and remove the rest of the disputed content as well.