Twitter owner Elon Musk told the BBC on April 11 morning that he would rather comply with the Indian government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail. Mr. Musk made the remarks in a Twitter Spaces interview.
When asked about the blocking of the BBC’s two-part documentary series India: The Modi Question, which critically examined Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots and more recent agitations by farmers and anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters, Mr. Musk said, “I don’t know about that, you know, what exactly happened with some content situation in India.”
He added, “The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country.” Mr. Musk was likely referring to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, more commonly known as the IT Rules. “But do you get that if you do that, you can incentivise countries around the world to simply pass more draconian laws,” the BBC’s James Clayton asked Mr. Musk.
“No — look, if we have a choice of either our people go to prison, or we comply with the laws, we’ll comply with the laws,” Mr. Musk said. “Same goes for the BBC,” the Twitter owner added, in a possible reference to the British public broadcaster’s cooperation with authorities in “surveys” on its New Delhi and Mumbai offices by the Income-Tax Department.
Mr. Musk is restating a view that his lawyers had outlined in court filings during a challenge of his attempt to pull out of acquiring Twitter in 2022. In those court documents, he had called a challenge against some blocking orders by the Union Government in the Karnataka High Court “risky”.
However, Twitter continues to fight the court case in the High Court, which on April 11 reportedly asked the government why it did not provide reasons for blocking orders it had issued to Twitter.
The Union Government on April 6 further amended the IT Rules to expose platforms to liability if they did not take down posts that have been marked as misinformation by the Press Information Bureau (PIB).
The amendment is being challenged in the Bombay High Court, where petitioner Kunal Kamra, a comedian, charged the government with violating the Shreya Singhal v. Union of India judgement of the Supreme Court, which laid out that “revocation of the safe harbour for intermediaries must conform to subject matters laid down in Article 19(2),” the Internet Freedom Foundation, which is providing legal support in the case, said in a statement.
