The expectation that a corporation operating in India will not obey Indian laws but American ones is appalling.<p>EU, Canada, China, Turkey or North Korea - if you want to do business there you have to respect their laws.<p>“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea.<p>If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly. It’s unreasonable to expect that a foreign corporation will do that for them, it even might be the case that they(the locals) don’t want it.<p>Imagine the other way around, Italian company selling Kinder Surprise Eggs in US, Swiss company doing banking by the Swiss laws in US, Malta company running gambling in the US by the Maltese laws. Would they be considered fighting the unreasonable food regulations, toppling the oppressive financial laws or pushing against tyrannical gambling laws of the US? I don’t think so.
Note that these tweets are only hidden for anyone in India (not removed from Twitter) since these do not violate Twitter’s terms but are being forced off the platform by a government order. I wish Twitter would put up a better fight on this, but Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook have been on the receiving end of criticism and threats by the central government, and it looks like Twitter chooses its battles to ensure its own survival first. What else can we expect from social networks anyway?
The government believes that hiding data is the answer to the problem.<p>> “It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.” [0]<p>A related comment [1] on censorship in India.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-deaths.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavi...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928462" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928462</a>
There is a very important fact that the Anglosphere (and the West in general) misses about India. We are a third world country where the State still has not acquired an absolute monopoly on violence. Most people do not trust that the cops will enforce the laws or that the courts will provide justice in time. Jurisprudence is all but non existent even at the highest levels and judgments depend on the whims and fancies of the judge/magistrate. This essentially results in a lot of disagreements being resolved in an extremely violent manner on the streets.<p>Under Articles 19(1) and 19(2) of the Indian Constitution, an individual's right to free speech is not absolute.[1] Further, Indian courts have often toed the line and held that maintenance of public order overrides any individual's right to free expression.<p>Political Twitter in India is primarily used by pro- and anti-Modi groups to abuse each other. Every photograph of a burning pyre and every apology from a media organization is another stick to beat the other with. Anti-Modi media might want to blame everything on the Kumbh and the elections, but this second wave has been noticeable since early/mid February and warnings were coming from states like Maharashtra, Punjab and Kerala. But the state and central governments didn't take these cases seriously till things got out of control. At one point, about 60+% of all new cases and deaths were coming from Maharashtra where there were no elections or Kumbh.<p>Personally speaking, this censorship is immaterial in the Indian context. If these tweets lead to rioting on the streets and a few people are murdered, that is just another day in India. The only thing I know for sure is that the people who will die are not the ones who tweet.<p>1. <a href="https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1218090/" rel="nofollow">https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1218090/</a>
Situation in India is far grim than Official no. portray. Many district report only <5 Covid deaths adding to the normal death rate of 50-100. But, when you go to cremation grounds they are overflowing, platforms to burn the dead a full and bodies are being burned at sides, footpath.
It is 2021, we should have decentralised authenticated version of text board by now. All the bs about crypto disruption, but nothing for such simple case.
It is not the governments duty to maintain an image, citizens or foreign parties are always free to criticise or praise any government. If the government feels something is factually wrong then it can present statements from its press agency but not suppress criticism. This is the difference between an authoritative regime & a democracy.<p>Whenever we are done with dealing with the pandemic who ever is responsible for giving these orders needs to be trialed.
I think there is far bigger issue than censorship here.<p>Significant portion of Indians already think there is big conspiracy behind Covid19 and everyone (Media, Governments, Healthcare professions, Big businesses, Pharma) is it to "$Insert your conspiracy here".<p>Now they see tweets being deleted just for being critical on government handling of issue. Doesn't that add fuel to conspiracy theories?
Few of the tweets removed are detailed here
<a href="https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/covid-pandemic-hoax-to-sharing-unrelated-image-of-burning-pyres-panic-monger-tweets-govt-of-india-removed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/covid-pandemic-hoax-to-shari...</a><p>Ps : the usual propaganda site or govt mouthpiece claims are bound to come out now. Read the article and make up your mind
Twitter has just been sued for defamation by James O'Keefe, who seeks to expose a lot of Twitter's internal decision-making criteria.<p>It should prove interesting.<p><a href="https://www.legalreader.com/project-veritas-james-okeefe-sues-cnn-twitter-defamation/" rel="nofollow">https://www.legalreader.com/project-veritas-james-okeefe-sue...</a>
Decriminalized = not illegal and not regulated<p>Social media platforms operate in that range, which is another similarity to drugs aside from calling their users “users”
Bigots are not qualified to rule/govern a culturally/socioeconomically diverse country like India; They should be banned from contesting elections; Why should we let ~22 crore (voters to BJP) decide the fate of remaining ~66 crore voters?
The framing of the blocked tweets as ones that criticized the government seems false to me thus far. From what I read only a small number (~50) tweets were removed, ostensibly for inciting violence or panic, via misinformation. The example messages I saw in some articles included fake images from unrelated situations and things of that sort. This seems like what is typically considered reasonable removal of misinformation, but has been framed as censorship by news media. This doesn’t make sense to me as an outsider, since clearly there are millions of tweets happening and a very small number were blocked - if censorship were the goal a much larger number of messages and accounts would need to be blocked.<p>So then this makes me question why there is so much outrage about this action. Those spinning up this outrage are likely ideologically opposed to the current ruling party in India, and are making an effort to undermine them politically. What has followed, like clockwork, is Western leftist news media and social media amplifying this messaging as much as possible. This is in keeping with the anti-India / Hinduphobic attacks we see regularly here in America in articles criticizing Modi or “news” segments run by outrage dealers like John Oliver.<p>As a related aside: it’s amazing to see all the American based news sites (Vox, TechCrunch, etc) run this story when they also regularly express support of tech companies practicing censorship per Silicon Valley political biases. Hell, a sitting US legislator (AOC) called for Parler to be kicked off the Apple and Google app stores (a violation of the first amendment), and many here on Hacker News cheered it on, under dubious claims that Trump incited violence even though Twitter’s own blog post on Trump’s permanent ban did not prove anything of the sort (<a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...</a>). Clearly a double standard is being exercised between America and India.<p>To be clear I do not support censorship personally. I am for something closer to absolute free speech and letting people figure out what they want to trust and distrust, rather than ceding control to EITHER governments or massive multinational tech corporations. But the hypocrisy here is astounding. When I see manufactured stories like this, I can’t help but think back to what Macron and his government warned about when they discussed the danger of American social media and the “intellectual matrix” coming out of the US (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threat-american-universities.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...</a>).
India is turning gradually authoritarian following Russia and china, with west turning blind eye, USA had their own problems in trump and right wing, No longer it has wiggle room or leverage to prevent this trend.
Western mainstream media loves it when Twitter censors conservatives, even the president of the USA.<p>But Western mainstream media doesn't like it when a third world govt tries to suppress fake narratives that could lead to unmanageable civic chaos.<p>Double standards I suppose.
Of course they do, they are willing servants of the governments. They also do not permit retweeting or liking a tweet by Martin Kulldorff because he states his scientific opinion that not everybody has to be vaccinated.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/1371638485686358018" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/13716384856863580...</a>
Well.... Twitter can delete or ban anything they want. They are a private company.<p>We did it before with Trump, and we used this exact reason.<p>Case closed.
Twitter will ban the American President but is afraid not to listen to the Indian government. I guess they choose what political parties they want to support.
Most of these type of tweets are just hoax and showing negative image of India, the PM, and the whole Corona Pandemic. Most of the images shows were from old incidents and programs, like the Kumbh mela pics. Thus most of these tweets are removed my the owners themselves either by uproar from followers, public or the government, what's wrong in that? People should not be using twitter for spreading lies, create panic among citizens and false news. And specially "The Wire" who has posted this news and is famous in spreading anti-govt news all the time !!!
The comments here read like most other threads on the Internet. Heavy defence of censorship.<p>Its a bit like China. When the concept "face" is being compromised, its vital to cover up the issue then to actually deal with the problem.
India is actually a democracy. For better or worse, I think India has the right to determine censorship policies for its citizens. Foreign Western corporations deciding that they know better than the Indian government and using their platform to spread dissent against the elected government is not a good look for a Western corporation given the history of British East India company.