Farmers protest: X complies with Indian government’s order to suspend accounts but says “We disagree…”

The Elon Musk-led-X, formally known as Twitter, has confirmed its compliance with executive orders issued by the Indian government demanding the suspension of specific accounts and posts, which are allegedly associated with the ongoing farmers’ protest. Despite taking action to withhold the identified accounts and posts within India, X has expressed its disagreement with the government’s directives, emphasizing its commitment to freedom of expression.

As per the official Global Government Affairs account of X, the platform is acting under potential threat of significant fines and imprisonment. However, in a move to challenge the government’s demands, X has filed a writ appeal, which is currently pending.

“The Indian government has issued executive orders requiring X to act on specific accounts and posts, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment. In compliance with the orders, we will withhold these accounts and posts in India alone; however, we disagree with these actions and maintain that freedom of expression should extend to these posts. Consistent with our position, a writ appeal challenging the Indian government’s blocking orders remains pending. We have also provided the impacted users with notice of these actions in accordance with our policies,” Global Government Affairs tweeted.

X has also informed that it has taken steps to notify affected users about the withholding of their accounts in line with its policies, while expressing a strong belief in the importance of transparency regarding such government orders.

The platform said due to legal constraints, it is unable to publicly disclose the contents of the executive orders but criticised the lack of transparency as potentially leading to arbitrary decision-making and a lack of accountability.

(You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel)