The Centre on Friday informed the Parliament that government authorities had not shut down the services of microblogging site Twitter and did not raid homes of executives of the company for hosting content of farmers’ agitation during 2021.
“Directions for blocking under section 69A were issued to block 3,750 Twitter URLs from August 2020 to December 2021. The ministry of electronics and information technology neither makes any request for user account data from any platform nor does it maintain such data,” Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.
The minister said that out of the 3,750 URLs, Twitter did not comply with 167 URLs. Therefore, the government issued notice to Twitter on June 27, 2022 giving them an opportunity to comply fully, “failing which they had to face significant consequences as mentioned in the IT Act, 2000”.