KARACHI: Twitter has blocked almost a million account tweets that focus on Kashmir at the behest of the Indian government, according to research conducted by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ).
According to the report published Friday by CPJ, an independent organization that works to promote press freedom worldwide, hundreds of thousands of tweets blocked in India since August 2017 under the country's retained content policy of Twitter were shared. for accounts that focus on Kashmir.
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The CPJ recovered the requests sent by the Indian authorities to Twitter between August 2017 and August this year of Lumen, an open database.
The CPJ found 53 letters sent by the Indian government to Twitter asking it to block all, or part of, 400 accounts during the period. According to CPJ's analysis, about 45 percent of those accounts mentioned Kashmir in the identifier or biography, or had recently tweeted about Kashmir. Thirteen of the 53 applications that list several hundred URLs were sent by the Indian electoral commission around the 2019 general elections. The remaining 40 were sent by the Ministry of Electronic and Computer Technology of India.
In August of this year alone, nine legal requests were sent to Twitter specifying 20 accounts and 24 tweets when the communications blackout in occupied Kashmir began, a considerable increase from the previous months.
Ninety-three of the 400 accounts were retained in India when CPJ tested them in September and October.
The vast majority (90 percent) of the retained accounts were from the group that referred to Kashmir, which hosted more than 920,000 tweets among them, CPJ found.
It is pertinent to mention that the actual number of demands, tweets and accounts may be much higher since the CPJ was able to retrieve the publicly available applications in Lumen.
Applications retrieved from Lumen that originated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology cited Section 69A of the Information Technology Law of India, which authorizes government agencies to direct intermediaries such as Twitter to block or eliminate Online content on a variety of reasons such as security and public order.
The CPJ also published a spreadsheet containing the analyzed data. The database shows that many journalists were trapped in the network. In August 2019, of the 20 accounts specified, at least five belonged to journalists and bloggers, including Pakistani defense journalist Kamran Yousuf.
Twitter, however, did not act on every request; several URLs remained accessible despite being cited.
Twitter's compliance with these requests has increased significantly since mid-2017, according to a CPJ review of the company's transparency reports for India. The company complied with a single request to retain a full account between December 2012 and June 2017, although it was requested to retain more than 900, the comparison of those CPJ reports revealed.
However, from then until December 2018, the number of accounts specified in the applications increased to 4,722. Twitter agreed to block 131 of them.
CPJ interviewed several affected users, including writer Ahmed bin Qasim, who was born in Kashmir, in India, but now lives in Pakistan.
A legal request cited Bin Qasim's Twitter account for violating Indian law on January 3, 2019. "My own people do not have access to my account," Bin Qasim told CPJ in October.
"The increase in legal demands to remove content on Twitter shows that India is expanding its censorship network beyond the borders of Jammu and Kashmir in its efforts to control the narrative around Kashmir and Twitter compliance means there is still less space for speech in the region, "said Aliya Iftikhar, senior researcher for Asia at CPJ, while talking with Dawn.
Posted in Dawn, October 26, 2019
Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1512977/almost-million-tweets-on-kashmir-blocked-at-indias-behest-cpj