Twitter has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in the Karnataka High Court challenging a government order to remove content on its platform and block accounts, according to a report from the New York Times.

The order had a deadline of Monday, July 4, 2022, which the social media giant complied to, but is now looking at challenging the order in the courts. Currently, no date for a hearing has been set. The lawsuit is another in a series of confrontations the company has had with the Indian government in the past. 

After the lawsuit was announced, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister of Information and Technology told reporters at a press conference that Twitter should follow the rules laid down by Parlianment.

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Twitter says that the point of the lawsuit isn’t to overturn the existing laws, instead it says that procedures in the IT laws weren’t followed. The company says that some of the content it has been asked to remove comes from the official handles of political parties, removing them would amount to violation of the freedom of speech.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has had a run-in with the government, the company had its offices raided in May last year  after a series of tweets by Prime Minister Narendra Modi were labelled “manipulated media.” The move came just months after India amended its existing IT laws.

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In February 2021, the IT laws were amended, making them open to broad interpretation as well as clauses that give the government oversight over what is being said on a social media company’s platform, which would also be required to trace where a message first originated.  In addition, the government can hold them liable for any content that it deems unfit. Critics had called it an invasion of privacy at the time. 

Since then, Twitter has been directed by Indian authorities to remove content that is critical of the government and tweets and accounts related to the farmer’s protests. The recent removal order was directed at an American non-profit organization called Freedom House. The NGO had tweeted that India was an example of a country where free freedom was on the decline. 

In the World Press Freedom Index report for 2022, India was ranked 150 out of 180, slipping eight places from its position at 142 in 2021. The 2022 report has said that “the violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis.” Earlier this year, Nityanand Rai, minister of state for home affairs, had told the Lok Sabha that the government’s official position was that it did not subscribe to the 2021 WPFI report, and it disagreed with the findings. Following the release of this year’s report in May, there has been no government response.