Twitter bans over 11 lakh Indian users for policy violations

Elon Musk-run Twitter banned a record 11,32,228 accounts in India between April 26 and May 25, mostly for promoting child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity.

The micro-blogging platform, who now has a new Twitter CEO in Linda Yaccarino, also removed 1,843 accounts for promoting terrorism on its platform in the country. In all, Twitter banned 11,34,071 accounts in a month in India.

In its monthly report, published in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021, Twitter said that it received 518 complaints from users in India in the same time frame through its grievance redressal mechanisms. In addition, Twitter processed 90 grievances which were appealing account suspensions.

“We overturned 25 of these account suspensions after reviewing the specifics of the situation. The remaining reported accounts remain suspended,” said the company.

“We received 29 requests related to general questions about Twitter accounts during this reporting period,” it added.

Most complaints from India were about abuse/harassment (264), followed by hateful conduct (84), sensitive adult content (67), and defamation (51).Under the new IT Rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms, with more than 5 million users, have to publish monthly compliance reports.

Last month, when asked about former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s wild claim that the Indian government had threatened to ban Twitter if it did not block certain accounts, Musk told reporters after his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the US that a company “doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments”.

“If we don’t obey local government laws, then we will get shut down. So the best we can do is really to hew close to the law in any given country,” he said.“It is impossible for us to do more than that (or) we will be blocked and our people will be arrested,” Musk added.

Meanwhile, Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that owner Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure”.

“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk said in a tweet.

He added that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.