India asks Twitter to remove some posts criticizing its handling of coronavirus

The government of India asked the social media platform Twitter to remove dozens of tweets, including some from local lawmakers, who criticize the government’s handling of the outbreak of COVID-19, while the country’s cases once again reached world highs.

Twitter removed some of the posts following the Indian government’s legal request, a company spokeswoman told Reuters on Saturday.

The government issued an emergency order to censor the tweets, Twitter revealed in the Lumen database, a Harvard University project.

In the government’s legal request, dated April 23 and published in Lumen, 21 tweets were mentioned. Among them were posts by a legislator named Revnath Reddy, a minister in the state of West Bengal named Moloy Ghatak, and a filmmaker named Avinash Das.

The standard cited in the government’s request was the Information Technology Act of 2000.

”When we receive a valid legal request, we review it according to the Twitter Rules and local law “the Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

”If the content violates Twitter’s rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is found to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but does not violate Twitter’s rules, we may deny access to content only on the India”, He said.

The spokeswoman confirmed that Twitter had notified account holders directly about the retention of their content and let them know that they received a legal order related to their tweets.

The event was previously reported by technology news website TechCrunch, which stated that Twitter was not the only platform affected by the order.

Hospitals overwhelmed in India called for oxygen supplies on Saturday as the country’s coronavirus infections spiked in what the Delhi high court called a “tsunami”, setting a world record for cases for the third day in a row.