NewsThe Indian High Court of Karnataka dismissed Twitter’s petition against the Central government’s blocking orders on Friday and imposed a ₹5 million rupees fine on the microblogging platform. The judgement comes almost a year after Twitter filed a petition in July of last year and was delivered by the single-judge bench of Justice Dixit.
Twitter filed the petition challenging the blocking order issued by the Federal Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under § 69A of the Information Technology Act, in which the Ministry set out several consequences of non-compliance with a series of blocking orders. These included initiating criminal proceedings against the company’s Chief Compliance Officer and removing Twitter’s “safe harbour” immunity, a protection statutorily afforded to all online intermediaries operating in the country under § 79(1) of the Information Technology Act.
§ 69A of the Information Technology Act permits the Central government the authority to issue information blocking orders to online intermediaries on the grounds of “sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above.”
Twitter contended in its petition that information blocking orders were both “procedurally and substantially deficient of the provision” and “demonstrate excessive use of powers and are disproportionate.” The primary contention was that the Ministry failed to provide the grounds for the blocking to be conducted, nor reasons in support of them which are in contravention of S. 69A as well as the previous jurisprudence of the Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Further, they submitted that blocking orders violates free speech under Article 19 of the Constitution and demonstrates an excessive, disproportionate and arbitrary use of powers. Also argued by the petitioners was that blocking the entire handle of the user instead of individual tweets would be disproportionate and affect the platform’s business.
The court rejected Twitter’s arguments that the Ministry was bound to provide reasons to the users of the accounts, stating:
I am of the considered opinion that notice to users of account in terms of Rule 8(1) of the Website Blocking Rules is not mandatory and that in any event, the absence of such notice does not avail to the intermediary as a ground for assailing the Blocking Orders.
The court also rejected the disproportionality argument, accepting the Central government’s argument that differentiating the innocuous tweets and offending tweets would be both “impracticable” and “not serving the statutory purpose,” relying on the jurisprudence laid down in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India. The court refused to lay down guidelines for the Centre to exercise its powers under Section 69A, terming it “judicially unassessable” by relying on the doctrine of separation of powers. The bench refused Twitter’s request to stay the operation of the order and declared the petition as “devoid of merits,” and dismissed it.
This development is the latest in a series of legal conflicts between the popular social media platform and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology over Twitter’s alleged non-compliance with several online information blocking orders and comes weeks after Twitter’s ex-CEO claimed that India threatened to shut down the platform in the country and raid the homes of employees, a statement that Indian Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrashekhar has called a “lie.”
