Twitter’s temporary resident grievance officer for India has stepped down, according to news agency PTI, amid the ongoing feud between Twitter and the Union government, According to the news agency, the San Francisco-based microblogging business, which has been chastised in India for not “complying” with local regulations, has made no statement on this development. This again, Twitter is left without a local officer, despite the fact that retaining a local officer for grievance resolution is a requirement under India’s new IT laws.
For a long time, Twitter in India lacked a grievance redressal officer. Twitter named Dharmendra Chaturas as the temporary grievance officer after the government ordered that all social media intermediaries operating in India must disclose the identity of the resident grievance officer. However, according to PTI, his name is no longer shown on the website.
The government urged Twitter to take action against accounts that trended #farmersgenocide during the farmers’ tractor march on Republic Day, and the conflict between Twitter and the Centre began in January of this year. The’verified’ label was briefly withdrawn from President Ram Nath Kovind’s personal Twitter account, as well as numerous RSS leaders’ accounts, including Mohan Bhagwat’s, as the dispute intensified. Then it labelled a post by BJP leader Sambit Patra as distorted media, and it recently suspended IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s Twitter account for an hour due to suspected copyright violations.
Shashi Tharoor, the chairman of a parliamentary subcommittee on information technology, recently met with Twitter India’s public policy manager Shagufta Kamran and legal counsel Ayushi Kapoor and told them that the platform must adhere to the law. Shashi Tharoor said the committee will ask Twitter for an explanation as to why the I-T minister was locked out, adding that he had experienced the same thing.
Meanwhile, in India, the microblogging platform has lost its intermediate status and is now editorially accountable for what its users write. The Ghaziabad Police have filed a FIR against Twitter and a few journalists in connection with an incident in Loni.
