Twitter removes 50 tweets critical of India's COVID-19 management

Twitter has pulled down at least 50 tweets at the behest of the Indian government criticising it for the poor handling of the ongoing Covid19 pandemicThe data available on Lumen database shows that the microblogging platform has deleted more than 50 tweets that belonged to people like Revanth Reddy an MP from Telangana Moloy Ghatak a West Bengal state minister two filmmakers an actor and othersFirst reported by Medianama the government had sent an emergency order to Twitter to remove these tweets A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement that when it receives a valid legal request it reviews it under both the Twitter Rules and local lawIf the content violates Twitters Rules the content will be removed from the service In all cases we notify the account holder directly so theyre aware that weve received a legal order pertaining to the account the company said in a statementFor the fifth consecutive day the country has reported over 2000 daily deaths India reported 349 lakh fresh Covid cases with 2760 deaths in the last 24 hoursIn February Twitter took a range of enforcement actions against certain Twitter accounts after the Indian government ordered it to take down more than 500 accounts for clear violations of its rulesDespite permanently banning these accounts Twitter said that it does not believe that the actions it has been directed to take by the Ministry of Information Technology are consistent with the Indian lawIn keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities journalists activists and politiciansTo do so we believe would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law the microblogging platform had reiteratedThe IT Ministry had sent Twitter three notices to block nearly 1435 accounts that were posting content in relation to the farmer protests in IndiaTwitter said that it withheld a portion of the accounts identified in the blocking orders under its Country Withheld Content policy within India onlyThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever