On 17 February 2021, the labelling system will be expanded to G7 countries Canada, Germany and Japan, along with several others like Cuba, Turkey, UAE and Thailand – but not India.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology recently ordered the microblogging site to take down 250 Twitter handles which had reportedly used a misleading hashtag, before expanding the demand to over 1,000 accounts which they accuse of Khalistani and Pakistani links.
While Twitter had initially complied with the first request, which included demands to take down farmer protest group handles as well as that of The Caravan magazine, it had subsequently restored many of these accounts. It also did not fully comply with the demands for taking down the second set of accounts.
The company argued that these included news organisations, journalists, activists and politicians, and taking them down would violate Twitter’s principles of “defending protected speech and freedom of expression.” It…
