Elon Musk stated on Wednesday that he didn’t know “what exactly happened” when Twitter took down content material associated to a documentary essential of Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this yr, including that some guidelines associated to social media content material have been “quite strict” in India.
In January, India ordered the blocking of a BBC documentary that questioned Modi’s management throughout the 2002 Gujarat riots, saying that even sharing of any clips by way of social media was barred.
The authorities had issued orders to Twitter to dam over 50 tweets linking to the video of the documentary, Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the federal government, had stated.
While the BBC had not aired the documentary in India, the video was uploaded on some YouTube channels, Gupta had stated.
“I am not aware of this particular situation… don’t know what exactly happened with some content situation in India,” Musk stated in an interview with the BBC broadcast dwell on Twitter Spaces when requested if the location took down some content material on the behest of the Indian authorities.
“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can’t go beyond the laws of the country,” he stated.
The documentary targeted on Modi’s management as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat throughout riots in 2002 through which not less than 1,000 individuals have been killed, most of them Muslims.
Activists put the toll at greater than twice that quantity.
“If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws…” Musk stated.
India’s regulatory scrutiny of varied USÂ tech corporations similar to Twitter, Facebook’s WhatsApp and Amazon.com, have harm the enterprise surroundings in a key development market, prompting some firms to rethink growth plans, Reuters has reported.
Indian authorities have prior to now requested Twitter to behave on content material similar to accounts supportive of an impartial Sikh state, posts alleged to have unfold misinformation about protests by farmers, and tweets essential of the federal government’s dealing with of the COVID-19 pandemic.Â
© Thomson Reuters 2023
