Twitter’s lawsuit challenging censorship in India is dismissed

A judge in the Karnataka High Court dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit Friday, writing in an opinion that he had reviewed the tweets with a government lawyer and concluded that “many of them have outrageous content; many are treacherous & anti-national.”

Determining whether there were sufficient reasons to remove an account was the “domain” of Indian authorities, wrote Judge Krishna Dixit. “The reasons have a thick nexus with the statutory grounds. It is not [as if] one single official functionary of the government in the fit of anger or anxiety has made these orders.”

Dixit also chastised the San Francisco-based company for failing comply with the Indian government orders, clogging the court with “hundreds of pages” of documents, arguing its case “for days” in court, and “keeping at bay worthier causes of native litigants.” He ordered Twitter to pay 5 million rupees, or roughly $60,000, as punishment.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the junior information technology minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), applauded the decision in a tweet.

The nonprofit Internet Freedom Foundation in New Delhi said the outcome of the case would deny Twitter users any recourse to challenging government censorship in India. Allowing authorities to take down entire accounts “imposes prior restraint on speech, and creates a chilling effect, causing users to fear posting anything due to the risk of losing account access,” the group said.

Twitter’s dispute with the Indian government began in 2021, when authorities ordered the takedown of thousands of tweets sent from groups supporting farmers who protested Modi’s effort to overhaul agricultural markets and cut subsidies.

Authorities alleged that the farmers — many of whom were Sikhs — were supported by a separatist movement seeking an independent Sikh state called Khalistan and, following a Jan. 26, 2021 protest in New Delhi that spiraled into violence, ordered the takedown of more than a thousand accounts.

After Twitter resisted some of the removal orders, its dispute with the government intensified. In February 2021, officials in the Modi government threatened legal action against Twitter employees in India. That May, an anti-terrorism police unit appeared at Twitter’s New Delhi offices shortly after it applied the “manipulated media” content warning on tweets posted by senior leaders in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. (Indian disinformation groups had warned at the time that BJP officials, including a spokesman and the health minister, were sharing a fake document about the government’s pandemic response.)

Last month, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive between 2015 and 2021, recalled during an interview on the “Breaking Points” podcast that the company came under intense pressure and received threats from government officials during the farmer protests.

“It manifested in ways such as, ‘We will shut Twitter down in India,’ which is a very large market for us. ‘We will raid the homes of your employees,’ which they did,” Dorsey said. “And this is India, a democratic country.”

Chandrasekhar, the BJP technology official and a longtime critic of Dorsey, responded on Twitter and accused the Silicon Valley executive of spreading an “outright lie.”

“Dorseys Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” Chandrasekhar wrote. “… To set the record straight, no one was raided or sent to jail. Our focus was only on ensuring the compliance of Indian laws.”

Amanpreet Warraich, a 42-year-old former IT professional, said she started the Twitter account Tractor 2 Twitter with four Punjabi friends in late 2020 to support the farmers movement and counter what she called “organized propaganda” by armies of pro-government supporters. The account often sought to dispel allegations that the protesting farmers were disloyal to India.

The account gained 25,000 followers within a few weeks and its volunteers, mostly members of the Punjabi diaspora scattered around the world, tried to directly reach out to foreign politicians and international celebrities, Warraich said.

The social media campaign proved effective. In February 2021, overseas celebrities including the pop singer Rihanna and NBA basketball player Kyle Kuzma voiced support for the farmer movement, prompting Indian officials to hit back at what they called foreign propaganda.

Tractor 2 Twitter was briefly suspended in January 2021 and permanently blocked in June 2022. Warraich said she had not been hopeful that Twitter would win in court and said moving forward, dissidents will need to tread carefully.

“The current ruling against Twitter will make [the] job of activists who use social media to express themselves lot more difficult,” she said. “Now we have to think twice before writing anything.”

Masih reported from Seoul. Shams Irfan and Anant Gupta contributed to this report.