Twitter and YouTube, in coordination with the Indian government, have censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Officials have urged big tech to crack down on a BBC documentary investigating Modi’s role in a 2002 genocidal massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which officials considered a “propaganda piece”.
In a series of articles, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India junk”. He said both Twitter and YouTube had been ordered to block links to the film, before adding that the platforms “followed the instructions”. Gupta’s statements coincided with posts from Twitter users in India who claimed to have shared links to the documentary, but whose posts were later removed and replaced with a legal notice.
“The government has sent hundreds of requests to various social media platforms, notably YouTube and Twitter, to remove the posts sharing snippets or links to the documentary,” Indian journalist Raqib Hameed Naik told The Intercept. “And shamefully, the companies are complying with their demands and have removed numerous videos and posts.”
“The government has sent hundreds of requests to various social media platforms, notably YouTube and Twitter, to remove the posts sharing excerpts or links to the documentary.”
This act of censorship, which wipes out allegations of crimes against humanity committed by a foreign head of state, is a concern for Twitter, especially given its new management.
Elon Musk’s self-identification as a “free speech absolutist” was a main talking point for the billionaire as he tried to explain why he took over the platform last year. Much of his criticism of Twitter revolved around its decision to censor coverage of Hunter Biden, son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
While Musk has happily resisted the suppression of anti-conservative speech in the United States – something he has described as nothing short of “a struggle for the future of civilization” – he appears to be foundering on the far more serious challenge of standing still towards the authoritarian demands of foreign governments. (Twitter’s communications efforts are now being led by Musk, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Mahua Moitra and Derek O’Brien, who opposed censorship of the BBC documentary, defiantly posted links to it online.
“Sorry, I wasn’t elected to represent the world’s largest democracy, to accept censorship.” moitra sent. “Here is the link. Check it out while you can.” Moitra’s post is still online, but the link to the documentation no longer works. Moitra had posted a link to the Internet Archive, presumably hoping to bypass the BBC’s block, but the Internet Archive subsequently removed the link. Since then she has published the audio version on telegram.
O’Brien’s post was itself dismantled.
Twitter even blocked Indian audiences from seeing two Contributions by actor John Cusack to link to the Documentary. (She remain visible to the American audience.) Cusack said he “pushed out the links and got an instant kickback.” He told The Intercept, “I’ve received two notifications that I’m banned in India.” The actor co-wrote a book with celebrated Indian scholar Arundhati Roy, a fierce critic of the Modi government, called Things That Can and Cannot Be Said”.
The Gujarat riots, as the violence is sometimes called, occurred in 2002 when Modi was the state’s prime minister. A group of militants allied to the Hindu nationalist movement, to which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party belongs, launched a violent campaign against local Muslims. Modi, who has been accused of personally encouraging the violence, reportedly called on police forces to back down amid the ongoing violence that has killed about 1,000 people.
“The documentary has unsettled Mr. Modi as he continues to evade responsibility for his complicity in the violence,” said journalist Naik. “He sees the documentary as a threat to his international image and has launched an unprecedented crackdown in India.”
Modi’s government in India has regularly used Twitter to bend the social media platform to its will. At one point, the government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in the country for refusing to ban accounts run by critics.
When Musk took over, Twitter only had a 20 percent completion rate when it came to takedown requests from the Indian government. When the billionaire privatized the company, around 90 percent of Twitter India’s 200 employees were laid off. Now the pressure from the Indian government on Twitter seems to be gaining traction.
A key difference might be Musk’s other business involvements. Musk himself has his own business interests in India, where Tesla has so far lobbied unsuccessfully for tax breaks to enter the Indian market.
Whatever the reason for the apparent change, Twitter’s moves at the behest of Modi’s administration do not bode well for Musk’s claims that he is running the company with the aim of protecting freedom of speech. While Musk felt comfortable delving into the US culture wars on behalf of conservatives, he was far more reluctant to take a stand on the far more dire threats to free speech posed by autocratic governments.
One of the early strengths of Twitter, and social media in general, was the threat it posed to autocratic governments, as evidenced by its use during the 2009 Iran protests and later during the Arab Spring. Dictators across the region berated the company for allowing what they considered forbidden speech.
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However, Musk has said that he will abide by local laws when it comes to matters of speaking. “Like I said before, I prefer to obey the laws of the countries where Twitter operates,” Musk said tweeted last year. “If the citizens want to ban something, then pass a law on it, otherwise it should be allowed.”
Google, which owns YouTube, is also under heavy pressure from the Indian government. The company’s public transparency reports show that the Indian government has been an amazing source for content removal, making over 15,000 censorship requests since 2011, compared to fewer than 5,000 from Germany and nearly 11,000 from the US over the same period.
These reports show varying levels of compliance on the part of Google: between January and June 2022, Google censored nearly 9 percent of articles submitted by the Indian government, but nearly 44 percent during that period in 2020. YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Akshay Marathe, a former spokesman for the opposition party that controls the Delhi and Punjab governments, told The Intercept that the calls for social media removal are part of a broader program of repression. Modi “quite brazenly used the Indian law enforcement apparatus to regularly jail political opponents, journalists and activists,” Marathe said. “His directive to Twitter to remove all links from the documentary (and Twitter’s shocking endorsement after Elon’s commitment to free speech) also follows the Modi government’s announcement that it will soon introduce a regulatory regime in which it will have the right to determine what fake news is and order big tech platforms to take down the content.”