Centre Vs Twitter: Karnataka HC Pulls Union Govt Over Repeated Adjournments

Karnataka High Court (HC) on Monday (January 9) pulled up the union government for seeking repeated adjournments in a case related to the blocking of accounts and posts on Twitter.

“We are not at the government’s dictation like that… What people will think? We are not at your beck and call. How many times you have taken adjournment? See the order sheet,” news agency PTI quoted Justice Krishna S Dixit as saying. 

Justice Dixit made the searing observation when the centre’s counsel sought adjournment and called for listing the matter for hearing on January 27 or February 3.

Expressing displeasure over the multiple delays, Justice Dixit said that the Court would grant a week’s time to the government citing the importance of the matter. The matter has been listed for January 18.

At the centre of the debate is the plea filed by Twitter last year against ten blocking orders issued by the Centre last year between February 2021 and February 2022. The directives by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) called for blocking certain information and suspending several other Twitter handles.

The matter was last heard on October 27 last year and then saw two subsequent adjournments at the behest of the government on November 16 and January 9.

In the plea, Twitter has claimed that the ban on accounts violated the rights of users under the Constitution while maintaining that the majority of tweets that the government had asked it to block were ‘innocuous.’

A majority of the block orders related to the removal of hundreds of accounts that criticised the union government over its handling of the pandemic and farmers’ protests. 

On the other hand, authorities have claimed that the directions were issued in national and public interest.

While the legal standoff is a first in the country, this is not the first time that the Indian government has sparred with social media platforms. Meta-owned WhatsApp has already mounted a legal challenge against the Competition Commission of India (CCI) over the contentious 2021 policy update 

Google also has filed a plea in the Supreme Court against the competition watchdog in an antitrust case. 

While the cases are ongoing, the recent past has seen the government issue a flurry of orders for banning certain content citing national security concerns. Recently, MeitY banned access to 67 pornographic websites and followed it up with multiple block orders that have seen ban on millions of videos and more than 100 YouTube channels 

Despite the legal troubles and internal squabbles, Twitter continues to eye the lucrative Indian market. According to Statista, India was the third largest market for the social media platform by user base, accounting for 23.6 Mn users as of January 2022.