Home ministry wants action against Twitter

New Delhi: India’s home ministry has asked the department of electronics and information technology (DIT) to consider punitive action against the social networking website Twitter for not providing information to its law enforcement agencies.

The Union home ministry communique to the DIT came in the wake of government being unable to block 28 accounts that were allegedly carrying inflammatory messages. “Twitter has not responded to any of our requests. We are asking it for IP addresses of those accounts carrying hate messages,” said a home ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Executives at Twitter couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

India has come down hard on such accounts after a spate of posts on them and telephone messages incited Muslims to act against people from the North-East, resulting in an exodus of people from the seven north-eastern states from across India.

“We are getting prompt cooperation from Facebook and Google,” he said.

The home ministry wants the DIT to set Twitter a deadline for providing the information.

Thus far, the government has blocked 245 websites carrying inflammatory messages and morphed images. On Wednesday, it initiated the process of blocking another 60 such webpages.

A DIT official who did not want to be identified said a fresh request has been sent to the department of telecommunications (DoT) to block some more websites.

The DoT then asks Internet service providers to comply.

Another DIT official, who too spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “Taking punitive action is not as simple as it is said. Twitter does not have servers in India. It doesn’t come directly under any Indian law. The maximum we can do is to block all of Twitter in India.”

“But the question is whether to block the entire website because lakhs of Indians have accounts on Twitter. There will be huge protest from social media and Internet activists and it will be seen as a move to curb freedom of expression and speech,” this person said.

In an unrelated development, the PTI reported that Twitter has promised to cooperate with the government after the Prime Minister’s Office complained to it about objectionable content on six accounts resembling the PMO’s official account.

After the government blocked the six accounts after Twitter took no action, the social networking portal has communicated to the PMO that it would be locating the “unlawful content”.

It has told the PMO that it could not take action earlier “because the government entity did not intimate through proper procedure electronically to our system and hence the request was not located”.

Twitter said it was “now actively reviewing” the request and will be seeking additional information from the ministry of communication and IT “to locate the unlawful content and the specific unlawful tweet”.

“India is important to us and we would like to have clearer communication in these matters in future,” the news agency cited the statement from Twitter as saying.

PTI contributed to this story.