Here’s Elon Musk’s Freedom of Speech: Twitter Censors BBC Document at Indian Government’s Request
Twitter after being acquired by Elon Musk it was to be, as its new owner himself put it, “the mainstay of freedom of speech”. The thing is, the social media platform has just taken to extensive censorship of a BBC-created documentary titled India: The Modi Question, the first part of which aired in the UK on January 17. The authors of the film took up the allegations that the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has been struggling with for a long time. His opponents accuse the politician of constantly fueling nationalist sentiments and prejudice against India’s large Muslim minority.
The creators of the production focus primarily on the role that Modi was supposed to play during the 2002 riots that took place in the state of Gujarat – the incumbent prime minister was his first minister at the time. As a result of these events, between 800 and 2,000 members of the Muslim minority were killed, and Modi’s passive attitude was widely criticized.
India’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Arindam Bagchi, described the document as “propaganda material to propagate a false narrative”; in response to these words, the BBC posted a statement on social media stating that the production was prepared to the “highest journalistic standards”.
A few hours later, Kanchan Gupta of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting revealed that the Indian government ordered Twitter and YouTube’s company Alphabet to block all links to the document – both those that showed its fragments and promotional materials – in its country . Both platforms eventually followed these “guidance”.
The censorship has been famous actor John Cusackwhich posted two entries about the film in question; in one of them he stated: “Fascism must watch this production.” His tweets are invisible in India, although they can be read in other countries.
This is not the first time that tech giants have complied with the orders/requests of the Indian government trying to introduce internet censorship. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of posts criticizing the local authorities for their disastrous approach to combating the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 infections disappeared from Twitter and Facebook (the previous Twitter bosses later defended that they had removed “only” 20% of the entries that they demanded to be blocked the row). In response, Modi’s political circle decided to threaten to imprison Twitter employees from India if the platform did not censor the voices critical of the prime minister.
Source:
Hollywood Reporter
