Parliamentary panel to ask Twitter about locking accounts: Shashi Tharoor

After Union Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor were temporarily locked out of their Twitter accounts on Friday, the latter said that he would seek an explanation from the microblogging platform for its actions.

“As Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, I can state that we will be seeking an explanation from @TwitterIndia for the locking of @rsprasad’s & my accounts & the rules & procedures they follow while operating in India,” Tharoor said in a tweet.

In an earlier tweet, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram had said: “And @Twitter locked me out again because to explain the problem, the first tweet in this thread included the offending copyrighted video. Locking is a foolish response to a DCMA notice; disabling the video (which they’ve now done) should be enough. @Twitter has a lot to learn.”

Earlier in the day, Prasad was denied access to his Twitter account for almost an hour over alleged violation of the US’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

After being temporarily blocked, Prasad said in a series posts on Koo, the India-made micro-blogging platform: “Twitter’s actions were in gross violation of Rule 4(8) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 where they failed to provide me any prior notice before denying me access to my own account.”

Prasad, who has been at the forefront of the government’s drive to bring in more compliance and stricter norms for social media platforms, added: “It is apparent that my statements calling out the high handedness and arbitrary actions of Twitter, particularly sharing the clips of my interviews to TV channels and its powerful impact, have clearly ruffled its feathers.”

“No matter what any platform does, they will have to abide by the new IT Rules fully and there shall be no compromise on that,” he added.