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    UP Police summons Twitter India MD in Ghaziabad viral video case

    Synopsis

    This marks the first such instance of police action against Twitter after it appears to have lost its intermediary status in India.

    Uttar Pradesh police sent legal notice to MD of Twitter India over Loni viral video incident
    Uttar Pradesh Police has summoned Twitter India’s managing director Manish Maheshwari to appear before a Ghaziabad police station in connection with a first information report (FIR) filed against the company for failing to ban the video of an attack on an elderly person, which has been retweeted multiple times.

    The notice issued by the UP Police on Thursday—reviewed by ET—asks Maheshwari to appear in the police station in Loni within seven days of its receipt and provide a statement. This marks the first such instance of police action against the American company after it appears to have lost its intermediary status in India after failing to comply with the country’s new IT rules that came into effect on May 26.

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    This has made the platform liable for prosecution under the IT Act as well as the Indian Penal Code.

    Last month, Maheshwari was questioned in Bengaluru by the Delhi Police on the issue of tagging certain tweets as “manipulated media”. The Delhi police is conducting preliminary investigations but has not filed an FIR in the matter.

    Twitter declined to comment on the latest developments.

    Capture

    The Ghaziabad Police in its FIR had said that Twitter failed to flag or delete the posts related to the case even after it issued clarifications negating the alleged communal nature of the crime, thus contributing to the flaring up of religious tensions.

    In his post on the microblogging platform on Wednesday, Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote “what happened in UP was illustrative of Twitter’s arbitrariness in fighting fake news. While Twitter has been over enthusiastic about its fact-checking mechanism, its failure to act in multiple cases like in UP is perplexing & indicates its inconsistency in fighting misinformation.”

    On Thursday, Prasad questioned the company's policy of selectively tagging Tweets as containing ‘manipulated media’. “If Twitter has a norm of declaring a particular Tweet as manipulated or unmanipulated, why was it not applied in the Ghaziabad case?” Prasad told television news agency ANI.

    “If half of the government is on Twitter including (the) Prime Minister and President...that shows how fair we are. But norms are norms. We are not in favour of banning any platform but you have to follow the law,” added Prasad, in the same interview.

    Under fire in recent weeks

    The San Francisco-headquartered company’s failure to appoint three key executives — required under the IT Act to be permanent employees by May 26, when the rules came into effect — has led to the government adopting an aggressive stance against it.

    On its part, Twitter has maintained that it continues to make every effort to comply with the new guidelines. The microblogging platform has informed the government of appointing an interim chief compliance officer, sources in the know told ET. It has already hired a lawyer on contract as its grievance and nodal officer.

    The microblogging platform has been under fire from the government over the last few months after it tagged certain tweets by BJP leaders as manipulated media. Twitter has refused to take down the tag saying that it violated the platform's policy.

    “We still feel like there’s room to really understand the various positions here and come to, perhaps, an understanding on some of these issues. I think the most important thing here is an open dialogue,” Twitter’s legal chief Vijaya Gadde had said last week.
    ( Originally published on Jun 18, 2021 )
    The Economic Times

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