Why should the temporary blocking of a handful of Twitter accounts grab national headlines when a country is seeing mass protests near the capital, and its national budget is just out? In India, the answer probably lies in how easily the online platform caved in to the government's demands to withhold accounts critical of the government.
On 1 February 2020, a number of Twitter accounts were withheld in India – rendering their tweets inaccessible to Indians (unless they changed their device geolocation by using a VPN service). The accounts that were withheld included that of the Delhi-based magazine The Caravan, actor Sushant Singh, activists Md Asif Khan and Hansraj Meena, CEO of Prasar Bharati Shashi Shekhar Vempati, member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Mohammed Salim and national executive member of the Aam Aadmi party Preeti Sharma Menon. All of them had one thing in common: they had tweeted about the ongoing farmers' protests against the new agricultural laws. Some of the accounts suspended (such as that of Kisan Ekta Morcha) were devoted to tweeting updates from the protests themselves.
But what were Twitter India's reasons for doing this? Several Indian news outlets quoted a source from the Ministry of Electronics and IT saying that they had directed the blocking of around 250 tweets and Twitter accounts – those using "a hashtag and making fake, intimidatory & provocative tweets" – under the Information Technology Act, based on instructions received from the Home Ministry. CP found this report odd, not just because some of the blocked accounts didn't fit that description, but also upon seeing the perfectly active accounts of several tweeps advocating for mass violence against the farmers.
For its part, in a somewhat vague statement given to Pranav Dixit of BuzzFeed News, Twitter said they withhold user content whenever they receive a "properly scoped request from an authorised entity", which they confirmed in this case was India's IT Ministry. That might be the most we will ever know about the temporary blocking, since they also said that they would not be uploading the details of the incident on Lumen, an online platform that collects and analyses requests to remove material from the web, since the accounts had been unblocked.