Thu 05 August 2021:
The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) stated on Wednesday that the Indian government’s requests that Twitter remove the “manipulated media” tags from some tweets were “over-reached” and beyond its “statutory powers”.
The IFF is a non-government digital rights advocacy group in India.
While asking Twitter to make its correspondence with the Indian government over the issue transparent, the IFF called out Indian authorities for allegedly trying to hinder fact checks by the micro-blogging app.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has admitted that there was no legal basis for the issuance of two letters to Twitter, urging it to stop using “manipulated media” tags on tweets by officials.
“This is important because the second letter asked Twitter to stop the practice of tagging dubious tweets as ‘manipulated media altogether’!” the IFF said on Twitter, revealing that it had asked MeitY to explain the legality of this move in the first place.
Neither Twitter, nor any official from the Indian government immediately reacted to IFF’s tweets.
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