As per the government source, the minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad was denied to access his own Twitter account for more than an hour. Twitter account of the IT Minister was visible to the users but the application was not granting permission to anyone to log in or make any post, the source added.
When anyone authorized to the account was trying to log in to the Twitter account, a message saying, “Your account has been locked because Twitter received a complaint Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notice for content posted to your Twitter account. Under the DMCA, copyright owners can notify Twitter claiming that a user has infringed their copyrighted works. Upon receipt of a valid DMCA notice, Twitter will remove the identified material. Twitter maintains a report copyright infringer policy under which repeat infringer accounts will be suspended. Accruing multiple DMCA strikes may lead to suspension of your account,” showed.
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The Minister shared his ‘peculiar’ experience on Twitter after having access, after almost one hour. He wrote, “Friends! Something highly peculiar happened today. Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account.”
IT Minister further said, “Twitter's actions were in gross violation of Rule 4 (8) of Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, where they failed to provide me any prior notice before denying me access to my own account.”
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After granting the access Twitter showed a warning message to the minister saying, “Your account is now available for use. Please be aware that any additional notices against your account may result in your account being locked against and potentially suspended. In order to avoid this do not post additional material in violation of our Copyright Policy and immediately remove any material from your account for which you are not authorized to post.”
Source from the minister’s team said that Twitter neither gave them any prior notice nor informed them about the content which violated its US laws on copyright.
Earlier this month, the Centre government issued a notice to Twitter and gave the application one last chance to immediately comply with the new IT rules, which clearly say that whenever content that does not belong to the user is posted then it is the responsibility of the social media platform that prior removing or disabling the access, it has to provide the user with a notification which explains the action being taken and the grounds or reasons for the action.