Elon Musk's Twitter bans over 52K accounts in India for policy violations

Micro-blogging site owned by Elon musk, announced that the platform has banned 52,141 accounts in India between August 26 and September 25 for promoting child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity and related content. Additionally, the platform also took down 1,982 accounts for promoting terrorism on Twitter in the country.

In its monthly report in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021, Twitter said that it received 157 complaints from users in India in the same time-frame through its grievance redressal mechanisms, and took action on 129 of those websites. In addition, Twitter said that it processed 43 grievances which were appealing Twitter account suspensions.

Under the new IT Rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms, with more than 5 million users, have to publish monthly compliance reports.

"We overturned none of these account suspensions after reviewing the specifics of the situation. All accounts remain suspended. We also received 12 requests related to general questions about Twitter accounts during this reporting period," it added.

Last month, Delhi Commission for Women chairperson Swati Maliwal had said the replies received from Twitter in the child pornography complaints were incomplete and the Commission was not satisfied with them. Maliwal had on September 20 met Twitter India Policy Head and Delhi Police to discuss over tweets depicting child pornography and rape videos of women and children on the micro-blogging platform. The Commission has taken suo moto cognizance of several tweets openly depicting videos and photographs of sexual acts involving children.

Elon Musk has also expressed grave concerns over reports about the presence of tweets soliciting child pornography on Twitter.

On Friday, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union minister of state for electronics and information technology told Reuters that "Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter will not change India's expectation that it must comply with the country's existing and upcoming new IT rules which will be published within days".

The microblogging site Twitter had a relatively low share in India's social media market as of August 2022 with around 3%, as per market research firm Statista report. This was still an increase compared to the same time last year when the platform held a 2.19% market share.