Twitteron Monday suspended several accounts of high-profile celebrities andorganisations, including actor Sushant Singh, Caravan magazine, Kisan EktaMorcha, Tractor2twitr and several other politicians, farmer leaders, writersand activists, at the behest of the Ministry of Electronics and InformationTechnology (MeitY) for spreading misinformation during the farmers' protests.
The IT ministry and law enforcement agencies had lastweek ordered Twitter to block these tweets and accounts under Section 69A of theInformation Technology Act.
As per reports a twitter spokesperson has said thatmany countries have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter accountcontent.
"In our continuing effort to make our servicesavailable to people everywhere, if we receive a properly scoped request from anauthorised entity, it may be necessary to withhold access to certain content ina particular country from time to time," the micro-blogging platform saidin a statement.
Transparency is vital to protecting freedom ofexpression, so we have a notice policy for withheld content. Upon receipt ofrequests to withhold content, we will promptly notify the affected accountholders (unless we are prohibited from doing so e.g. if we receive a courtorder under seal)," the company informed.
Twitter last week said it suspended more than 300accounts engaged in spam and platform manipulation as the farmers' tractorrally went violent in the national capital on the 72nd Republic Day.
The farmers swarmed the Red Fort and waved farmerunion flags from its ramparts. They even hoisted farmer union flags as well asa pennant with a Sikh religious symbol from a flagpole.
A Twitter spokesperson said that the company hastaken strong enforcement action to protect the conversation on the service fromattempts to incite violence, abuse and threats that could trigger the risk ofoffline harm by blocking certain terms that violate our rules for trends.
"Using a combination of technology and humanreview, Twitter worked at scale and took action on hundreds of Tweets that havebeen in violation of the Twitter Rules and suspended more than 300 accountsengaged in spam and platform manipulation," the spokesperson informed.
The Delhi Police had warned that 308 Twitter handleshave been generated to create confusion over the tractor rally proposed byprotesting farmers on Republic Day.