Through four (1, 2, 3, 4) directives to Internet Service Providers between 18 August and 21 August, the department of telecom has blocked numerous web pages on concerns that communal tensions were being fanned in the wake of the unrest following violence in the border districts of Assam. After protests in Mumbai on August 18 turned violent, the government had said that hate content was being spread through the internet by groups in Pakistan.
The directive to block 16 twitter handles were part of notification sent out by the communications ministry on August 20. Only one of the twitter handles—@PM0India (the digit zero instead of alphabet O)—bears resemblance to the prime minister's official account 'PMOIndia'.
The Twitter accounts of two journalists—columnist Kanchan Gupta and television journalist Shiv Aroor—are among those whose Twitter accounts have been blocked.
ET accessed the government directive of blocking these twitter handles.
The directives only say that it has been decided to block these accounts. It does not quote any sections of the IT Act or any other law under which the decision to block the websites has been taken.
The other twitter handles that have been blocked include Dosabandit (@dosabandit), Eagle Eye (@eagleeye47), Twitanci (Anil Kohli) - @anilkohli54, Sangparivar.org (@sanghpariwar), Amit Paranjape (@apranjape), Sumeet (@sumeetcj), Dr Pravin Togadia (DrPravinTogadai), Panchajanya (@i_panchajanya), two accounts of barbarian Indian (@barbarindian), scamsutra (@scamsutra), Ekakizunj (@ekakizunj) and redditindia (@redditindia).
Many of these handles were still accessible across internet connections with the exception of Airtel.
This comes even as Twitter, which has about 16 million accounts from India, agreed to block six fake accounts, which the government said were 'misrepresenting' Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
"Twitter has agreed to block the six fake PM accounts. They responded to our complaint saying we need to follow an internal channel to lodge a formal complaint in the matter," a news report quoted PM's communications adviser Pankaj Pachauri as saying.
But when ET contacted Pachauri, he said that the Indian government did not have a 'problem with criticism on social media'.
"In fact, we welcome it as genuine feedback. In some instances, actions have been initiated on complaints made to PM's Twitter account. We also have no quarrel with people parodying PM as long as it is in the limits of good humour. We complained to Twitter about handles which were mis-representing the Prime Minister, impersonating his office and loading material with his picture which was inciteful and could have led to confusion about communally sensitive issues among the Twitter users. When they did not respond, we took advice from the legal department in June and complained to the cyber security cell of the government for appropriate action. Now Twitter has emailed to us that they will review our requests and they will be in touch with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology about this matter. We welcome their cooperation and will follow up with them," Pachauri said.
Source: Times Of India
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