Indian government respond to the ‘Twitter Files’

What’s in today’s article:

• Why in News?
• Twitter Files – about, revelation made, significance, criticism, response from India

 

Why in News?

• The fresh revelations made in a follow-up to the ‘Twitter Files’, have been described as “disturbing” by the Indian government.
• 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.

 

About Twitter Files

• Earlier, Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, announced the publication of exclusive emails revealing some of the social media company's internal deliberations.
  • These deliberations were made over a disputed decision made in 2020 before the US Presidential elections.
• This revelation is being dubbed as Twitter Files. It showed internal conversations between certain top-level officials at Twitter.
• In other words, the Twitter Files are a series of Twitter threads based on internal documents shared by owner Elon Musk with freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in December 2022.

 

What are the revelations made by twitter files?

• 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’s son Hunter Biden.
  • The story contained unverified claims about Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine.

• The teams of Twitter employees building blacklists, preventing disfavoured tweets from trending, and actively limiting the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.

• These tools targeted right-wing voices more frequently and went against Twitter’s stated policy of not enforcing shadow bans.
  • A shadow ban refers to partially blocking or blacklisting a user's profile to reduce visibility without their knowledge.
  • It may lead to less engagement with the account and low visibility of posts instead of an outright ban.
  • In other words, followers cannot see one’s posts on a social media platform.
• The decision by Twitter management to permanently suspend Trump's personal Twitter account.

 

What is the significance of twitter files?

• The saga does indeed point to questions of fairness and possible arbitrariness in content moderation.
• This includes who decides what is hateful and whether all content of similar degrees of illegality are acted on with uniform strictness.
• It highlighted the power large tech companies wield with little accountability.
• 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.

 

What are the criticisms of the twitter files?

• It could not create the impact it had hoped for
  • The revelations did not have the effect experts had hoped for.
  • This is mostly due to one significant factor: the story provides no explanation for why that choice was made.
  • It confirms a number of previously identified available facts while failing to offer light on the issue of whether such choices were made due to political influence or control.
• Personal information was made public
  • The discoveries have also been criticized for making public the email addresses and other personal information of those participating in the process.
• Concerns over safeguards in Twitter under Musk
  • These episodes have also raised concerns over safeguards in Twitter under Musk.
  • The screenshots shared showed a dashboard that would allow anyone using the ability to access direct messages which people privately share with other users.
  • Twitter’s direct messages are not encrypted in a manner that, for example, WhatsApp messages are, allowing the company to access these.

 

What is the response from India?

• Weaponizing misinformation is unacceptable
  • Minister of state for electronics and IT said the revelations around visibility filtering were disturbing.
  • This revelation shows that the platform was not only actively involved in whose content went where but also involved in shaping end result conversation.
  • The fact that a few people were distorting the conversations happening on the platform and weaponizing misinformation is unacceptable.
• India has taken pre-emptive step
  • India was right in pre-empting these issues and framing the amended IT Rules which were notified a few weeks ago.
  • 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.
  • The minister said that the formation of such committees will be fast-tracked in the light of the revelations.
• Safe harbours for Internet Intermediaries must be conditional
  • 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.
    • Safe harbour essentially offers legal immunity to social media firms from user-generated content on their platforms.

 

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Q1) When was Twitter launched to the public?

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched on July 15, 2006.

 

Q2) What is content moderation?

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.

 

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