India Court: Elon Musk-owned X seeks to challenge court ruling on content blocking orders in India

Last year, X (previously Twitter) sued the government, challenging some of the block orders on tweets and accounts that the central authorities alleged were spreading misinformation about anti-government protests by farmers. A year later, Karnataka High Court dismissed Twitter‘s plea challenging the government’s orders and fined the company Rs 50,00,000.Now the company has sought to quash the decision by the Karnataka court.

According to a report by news agency Reuters, X argued in a 96-page filing that if its appeal is rejected, the government “will be emboldened to issue more blocking orders” that violate law. It added that there must be “discernible parameters” on what mandates the blocking of an entire account instead of a specific post, otherwise, the government’s “power to censor future content is untrammelled”.

In its original lawsuit, the company claimed that some block orders by the government “pertain to political content that is posted by official handles of political parties” and even alleged that New Delhi threatened to open criminal proceedings against its chief compliance officer in the country if Twitter didn’t comply with orders.
“Blocking of such information is a violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed to citizen-users of the platform. Further, the content at issue does not have any apparent proximate relationship to the grounds under Section 69A,” it argued.
Ex-Twitter CEO’s ‘threats’ claims
In an interview earlier this year, Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey claimed that the government had many requests to take down content “around farmers’ protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government.”

He also alleged that the company was threatened with shutting down Twitter in India and raid the homes of employees.
His remarks drew immediate criticism from the government and IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar termed Dorsey’s claim as an “outright lie”. The minister also said that Twitter “behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it.”
The court ruled that Twitter was served notices, to which it did not comply, Chandrasekhar said in a tweet.