BENGALURU: The union government has informed the High Court of Karnataka that being a significant intermediary, micro blogging site Twitter has additional responsibility and it was its duty “to provide details of account holders”. Additional Solicitor General R Sankarnarayanan who appeared for the central government, gave the examples of “dangerous” tweets that “is going to affect the integrity, sovereignty of India or is going to create a public (dis) order; then naturally we will step in and either we will issue a take down notice or we will say block the account.”
The ASG cited “somebody gives a tweet under the assumed name of Government of Pakistan about India Occupied Kashmir, somebody says (V) Prabhakaran (LTTE leader) is a hero and he is coming back. All this is so dangerous that it is going to incite violence.” Twitter approached the HC in June 2022 against the take-down orders issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
Twitter claims the government is required to issue notice to the owners of the twitter handles whose accounts are blocked. Twitter has also claimed that the government has even prevented it from informing the account holders whose accounts have been ordered to be blocked.
The ASG also submitted to the court that Twitter cannot take protection under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act which exempts social media intermediaries in certain cases. Twitter was bound to follow the directions of the authorities designated by the government, he submitted. The ASG said that according to Rule 4 of IT Rules 2021, Twitter was required to provide details required by the government.
