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This is appalling. The Caravan is one of India's most important independent news organizations. It publishes rigorous investigations that very few others have the courage, or the skill, to pull off. https://twitter.com/pranavdixit/status/1356171219805073408
Can you imagine @twitter summarily yanking the account of The New Yorker or The Atlantic following a legal letter? Applying human rights based standards for content moderation at global scale may be hard, but it's the job they signed up for.
And they are back. But let's be clear, the goal of this kind of harassment is to achieve a cumulative effect and @TwitterIndia has been quick to cave to it before.
Hate speech and misinformation on the platform won't be cured only by suspending bad actors. You also need to foster rights and fact-based discourse.
Apologies, looks like it's still inaccessible from India. Which is a perfect illustration of the fact that this suspension is not based on any consistent standard.
When Penguin pulped Wendy Doniger's The Hindus without putting up a legal fight they caved to the trolls, but illustrated a principle: big global players want the Indian audience but won't deploy their resources to defend rights.
The trolls are in government now, and increasingly in control of the courts and the mainstream press. A small band of reporters and editors is braver in the face of their intimidation than a multi-billion dollar global tech giant is prepared to be.
The farmer protests are the biggest threat to the Modi government since its advent in 2014. It isn't hard to figure out what is going on here: https://scroll.in/latest/985648/twitter-withholds-accounts-of-caravan-kisan-ekta-morcha-and-others-in-response-to-legal-request
Having complied, is really important that @TwitterIndia challenge this order in court, and make a public argument in defense of its standards, or we will be left to conclude that they apply only in the west.
It seems likely that @TwitterIndia had little choice but to comply with the order, and perhaps to say little about it, but an urgent court application would carry the message loudly.
India's crackdown on dissent is broad and deep, and affects most severely Dalit and Tribal activists. But in this instance the point of pressure is a huge global platform that Narendra Modi uses daily. That is an opportunity, and a test.
