Twitter
on Monday suspended several accounts of high-profile celebrities and
organisations, including actor Sushant Singh, Caravan magazine, Kisan Ekta
Morcha, Tractor2twitr and several other politicians, farmer leaders, writers
and activists, at the behest of the Ministry of Electronics and Information
Technology (MeitY) for spreading misinformation during the farmers' protests.
The IT ministry and law enforcement agencies had last
week ordered Twitter to block these tweets and accounts under Section 69A of the
Information Technology Act.
As per reports a twitter spokesperson has said that
many countries have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account
content.
"In our continuing effort to make our services
available to people everywhere, if we receive a properly scoped request from an
authorised entity, it may be necessary to withhold access to certain content in
a particular country from time to time," the micro-blogging platform said
in a statement.
Transparency is vital to protecting freedom of
expression, so we have a notice policy for withheld content. Upon receipt of
requests to withhold content, we will promptly notify the affected account
holders (unless we are prohibited from doing so e.g. if we receive a court
order under seal)," the company informed.
Twitter last week said it suspended more than 300
accounts engaged in spam and platform manipulation as the farmers' tractor
rally went violent in the national capital on the 72nd Republic Day.
The farmers swarmed the Red Fort and waved farmer
union flags from its ramparts. They even hoisted farmer union flags as well as
a pennant with a Sikh religious symbol from a flagpole.
A Twitter spokesperson said that the company has
taken strong enforcement action to protect the conversation on the service from
attempts to incite violence, abuse and threats that could trigger the risk of
offline harm by blocking certain terms that violate our rules for trends.
"Using a combination of technology and human
review, Twitter worked at scale and took action on hundreds of Tweets that have
been in violation of the Twitter Rules and suspended more than 300 accounts
engaged in spam and platform manipulation," the spokesperson informed.
The Delhi Police had warned that 308 Twitter handles
have been generated to create confusion over the tractor rally proposed by
protesting farmers on Republic Day.