NEW DELHI: After staring the Centre in the face for weeks, microblogging site Twitter on Sunday partially fell in line, appointing an Indian as its grievance redressal officer as mandated under the newly notified IT rules. It also released its first monthly compliance report in accordance with the rules.
Called the ‘India Transparency Report: User Grievances and Proactive Monitoring July 2021’, Twitter said it received 94 grievances and ‘actioned’ 133 URLs between May 26 and June 25. Twitter named Vinay Prakash as its resident grievance officer in India to comply with the rules and shared his company email on the website.
On Twitter’s transparency page, it said, “In compliance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, we have published our inaugural report on July 11, 2021 for the reporting period from May 26, 2021 through to June 25, 2021.” The company said it had received 94 grievances via its grievance officer-India channel.
The majority of complaints were of defamation, abuse/harassment, sensitive adult content, impersonation and privacy infringement, IP-related infringement, and misinformation/ synthetic and manipulated media. The highest number of URLs against which action was taken was for defamation, followed by abuse.
“In addition to the above data, we processed 56 grievances which were appealing Twitter account suspensions. These were all resolved and the appropriate responses were sent.” In the category of ‘proactive monitoring data’, Twitter said 18,385 accounts were suspended over the issue of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity and similar content.
Over 4,100 accounts were suspended for promotion of terrorism. These, however, represent global actions and are not just India specific. Recently, the Delhi High Court had refused to allow any interim protection to Twitter. Earlier this month, Twitter had appointed an interim chief compliance officer. It had also sought eight weeks from the Delhi High Court to appoint a grievance officer. Twitter has already been booked in four cases. Following a Cabinet reshuffle, newly appointed Union information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had said the law of the land was supreme and Twitter will have to fall in line.
‘Actioned’ on defamation
The catagory-wise URLs ‘actioned’ upon are: defamation (87), abuse/ harassment (38), impersonation (1), infringement of privacy (6) and misinformation/ synthetic and manipulated media (1)