Within 48 hours, Twitter has been sent a letter by the IT Parliamentary Committee, has had three FIRs filed against it, has received another letter from the National Commision for Women, and been dragged to the Supreme Court over a 10-day old FIR
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While it took the IT Parliamentary Committee about two-and-a-half hours to deal with both Facebook and Google, Twitter drew the brunt of the members’ ire on June 18, 2021, in a 100-minute deposition. Twitter’s public policy manager Shagufta Kamran and legal counsel Ayushi Kapoor were questioned over why the platform had not appointed the three required officers to comply with the new Intermediary Rules. It is understood that Twitter’s representatives cited the Covid-19 pandemic as the reason for not appointing the necessary people. At least one committee member said that Twitter needed to obey the law of the land.
In a subsequent 30-minute deposition by officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), which included Secretary Ajay Prakarsh Sawhney, it is understood that MeitY said that, in its opinion, Twitter had lost its safe harbour by complying with the Rules.
Read more about how courts, and not the government, are the only ones that can confer or take away the safe harbour status here.
‘Who are your fact checkers?’ asks committee
In an obvious reference to the furore around a recent viral video on Twitter that showed young Hindu men forcefully cutting the beard of an aged Muslim man, committee members asked Twitter to furnish information on their factcheckers. In a subsequent First Information Report (FIR) filed by Ghaziabad police June 15, Mohammad Zubair, the co-founder of Alt News, and Twitter were named alongside a host of journalists. Twitter was named in the FIR since it hadn’t labelled the video as ‘misleading content’.