{"id":33941,"date":"2022-12-10T12:36:30","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T07:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=33941"},"modified":"2025-06-30T12:05:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T06:35:43","slug":"indian-government-respond-to-the-twitter-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/indian-government-respond-to-the-twitter-files\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian government respond to the \u2018Twitter Files\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><strong>What\u2019s in today\u2019s article:<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Why in News?<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Twitter Files \u2013 about, revelation made, significance, criticism, response from India<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Why in News?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The fresh revelations made in a follow-up to the \u2018Twitter Files\u2019, have been described as \u201cdisturbing\u201d by the Indian government.<\/li>\n<li>Minister of state for electronics and IT said that Twitter Files revelations present evidence that the platform was being misused and the platform was acting absolutely discriminately against different people.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>About Twitter Files<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Earlier, Elon Musk, Twitter&#8217;s new owner, announced the publication of exclusive emails revealing some of the social media company&#8217;s internal deliberations.\n<ul>\n<li>These deliberations were made over a disputed decision made in 2020 before the US Presidential elections.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>This revelation is being dubbed as Twitter Files. It showed internal conversations between certain top-level officials at Twitter.<\/li>\n<li>In other words, the <u>Twitter Files are a series of Twitter threads<\/u> based on internal documents shared by owner Elon Musk with freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in December 2022.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What are the revelations made by twitter files?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The files released in parts made some big revelation about the discussions that led to the banning of a New York Post story concerning the contents of current US President Joe Biden\u2019s son Hunter Biden.\n<ul>\n<li>The story contained unverified claims about Hunter Biden\u2019s business activities in Ukraine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The teams of Twitter employees building blacklists, preventing disfavoured tweets from trending, and actively limiting the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics\u2014all in secret, without informing users.<\/li>\n<li>These tools targeted right-wing voices more frequently and went against <u>Twitter\u2019s stated policy of <\/u><strong><u>not enforcing<\/u><\/strong><u> shadow bans<\/u>.\n<ul>\n<li><strong>A shadow ban<\/strong> refers to <u>partially blocking<\/u> or blacklisting a user&#8217;s profile to reduce visibility without their knowledge.<\/li>\n<li>It may lead to less engagement with the account and low visibility of posts instead of an outright ban.<\/li>\n<li>In other words, followers cannot see one\u2019s posts on a social media platform.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The decision by Twitter management to permanently suspend Trump&#8217;s personal Twitter account.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What is the significance of twitter files?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The saga does indeed point to questions of fairness and possible arbitrariness in content moderation.<\/li>\n<li>This includes who decides what is hateful and whether all content of similar degrees of illegality are acted on with uniform strictness.<\/li>\n<li>It highlighted the power large tech companies wield with little accountability.<\/li>\n<li>A free speech corporate mission, that Twitter often espoused, was evidently undermined when it banned the NY Post story from being linked to on its service.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What are the criticisms of the twitter files?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>It could not create the impact it had hoped for<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>The revelations did not have the effect experts had hoped for.<\/li>\n<li>This is mostly due to one significant factor: the story provides no explanation for why that choice was made.<\/li>\n<li>It confirms a number of <strong>previously identified<\/strong> available facts while <u>failing to offer light on the issue of whether such choices were made due to political influence or control<\/u>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Personal information was made public<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>The discoveries have also been criticized for making public the email addresses and other personal information of those participating in the process.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Concerns over safeguards in Twitter under Musk<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>These episodes have also raised concerns over safeguards in Twitter under Musk.<\/li>\n<li>The screenshots shared showed a dashboard that would allow anyone using the ability to access direct messages which people privately share with other users.<\/li>\n<li>Twitter\u2019s direct messages are not encrypted in a manner that, for example, WhatsApp messages are, allowing the company to access these.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What is the response from India?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Weaponizing misinformation is unacceptable<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>Minister of state for electronics and IT said the revelations around visibility filtering were disturbing.<\/li>\n<li>This revelation shows that the <u>platform was not only actively involved in whose content went where but also involved in shaping end result conversation<\/u>.<\/li>\n<li>The fact that a few people were distorting the conversations happening on the platform and weaponizing misinformation is unacceptable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>India has taken pre-emptive step<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>India was right in pre-empting these issues and framing the amended IT Rules which were notified a few weeks ago.<\/li>\n<li>Under the amended rules, the government will appoint a grievance appellate committee that would have powers to oversee and overturn content moderation decisions taken by social media platforms.<\/li>\n<li>The minister said that the formation of such committees will be fast-tracked in the light of the revelations.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Safe harbours for Internet Intermediaries must be conditional<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>Twitter Files have shown that it is very obvious that safe harbours for Internet Intermediaries must be conditional on them following a set of rules as India has done.\n<ul>\n<li>Safe harbour essentially offers legal immunity to social media firms from user-generated content on their platforms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><strong>Q1) When was Twitter launched to the public?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in <strong>March 2006<\/strong> and launched on July 15, 2006.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>Q2) What is content moderation?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Content Moderation is the practice of monitoring and applying a pre-determined set of rules and guidelines to user-generated submissions to determine best if the communication (a post, in particular) is permissible or not.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter files showed internal conversations between certain top-level officials at Twitter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":33942,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-33941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-mains-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}