Indian govt could take on Twitter over failure to filter inflammatory tweets

Oh look. Twitter’s in hot water in India. Again. This time the Indian government is going after the social network because it has failed to comply with the country’s efforts to clean up social media.

According to the Times of India attention returned to Twitter shortly after the country accused neighboring Pakistan of using social media to spread “disinformation”. The government’s attention then turned to Twitter when the social network refused to block inflammatory messages in the volatile North Western part of the county

Earlier this year the government tried to censor social networks for posting content that was offensive to Indian culture. While the current situation is undoubtedly more volatile, it seems to demonstrate a similar misunderstanding on the part of the state about the nature of social networks.

The Times writes:

A senior government official has said that Twitter has already been told that legal action may be taken against it as it had failed to cooperate with the Indian government in its efforts to find the source of and curtail the inflammatory messages against citizens.

Twitter doesn’t have a specific presence in India. Despite this however, the company’s response to the situation has been described as “poor”. As The Next Web rightly points out, there’s a massive amount of content that goes through Twitter — nearly 340-million messages a day.

Even with its new country-specific censorship policy, that’s a hell of a lot to try to filter out.