Twitter slams Indian police ‘intimidation’, new IT rules

The Indian government's battle with social media giants escalated yesterday with Twitter accusing the police of "intimidation" and slamming new IT rules that have also alarmed its peers and privacy campaigners. Critics say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration wants to stifle online criticism in what is a huge market for Twitter, Facebook and others. The government rejects the accusations. Late Monday Indian police visited Twitter's offices to serve a notice to the US company over its failure to remove a "manipulated media" label that it had placed on a tweet by the ruling party's spokesman. It followed spats earlier this year when Twitter partially refused to comply with official requests to remove tweets critical of contentious new farming laws and of the government's handling of the pandemic.