Twitter and the Centre must both comply with Indian law

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Twitter and the Centre must both comply with Indian law

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• Twitter versus Govt. of India: The government brought the new IT rules 2021, called "The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021". There are two parallel narratives on this topic.
• The narratives: One talks of India's sovereignty and the arrogance of an American company ignoring Indian laws. The other says it's all about crushing dissent and chilling free speech.
• Four insights: This situation can be understood thus -

1. Companies operating in India have to comply with the laws of India, and Twitter's understanding that the new law is unconstitutional, has to be challenged in a court of law. Get a stay on its operation. 
2. Companies operating in India have the protection of law itself. Twitter is a private firm, that can make rules for its own platform, if they don't violate Indian laws. It has policies on tweet-labelling ('manipulated media'), blue ticks allotment and suspending accounts that violate its terms badly. India has no law of any of these specific things, so Twitter has a right to do what it's doing, as it was to stop fake news, deep fakes and violent ideas (something similar led to the riots in Washington DC Capitol on 06th June, 2021). Users can leave the platform if they don't agree with these policies, just like a hotel, or hostel.
3. Twitter has agreed to appoint the resident grievance officer (as per new Intermediary Guidelines), but is not ready to appoint permanent employees for those posts. It is fearful of what the police may do to those employees, as a recent "raid" perhaps indicated (After Twitter labelled a tweet from a member of BJP). So there's partial compliance, and the govt. may remove the "intermediary" status of Twitter. That will lead to its exit from India (like Coca Cola did when asked to give its formula).
4. So on one hand, Twitter refused to ban "Caravan" magazine's account as govt. wanted, so violated the law. But it also was defending the free speech guaranteed in Constitution! Twitter's business model is about defending free-speech rights. Government have the right to ask banning handles but that cannot be about killing inconvenient speech.

• Retrospective taxation: If twitter exits India, it would be just like the retrospective taxation cases causing a large outcry. India-US ties will be impacted. Twitter's treatment will reduce India's international ranking on democratic and freedom indices, taking India closer to China and Russia. Even local political parties will be hit hard as twitter is a large platform for them too.
• US and Twitter: When President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, all that happened was a Congressional hearing, but nothing else. The lawmakers didn't aggravate the situation at all. It just died down.
• Summary: Indian courts are yet to decide on these guidelines, and perhaps given the sheer breadth of these, they will be found unconstitutional.

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