Elon Musk mentioned on Wednesday that he didn’t know “what precisely occurred” when Twitter took down content material associated to a documentary important of Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this yr, including that some guidelines associated to social media content material had been “fairly strict” in India.
In January, India ordered the blocking of a BBC documentary that questioned Modi’s management in the course of the 2002 Gujarat riots, saying that even sharing of any clips through social media was barred.
The federal government had issued orders to Twitter to dam over 50 tweets linking to the video of the documentary, Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the federal government, had mentioned.
Whereas the BBC had not aired the documentary in India, the video was uploaded on some YouTube channels, Gupta had mentioned.
“I’m not conscious of this specific scenario… do not know what precisely occurred with some content material scenario in India,” Musk mentioned in an interview with the BBC broadcast stay on Twitter Areas when requested if the positioning took down some content material on the behest of the Indian authorities.
“The principles in India for what can seem on social media are fairly strict and we will not transcend the legal guidelines of the nation,” he mentioned.
The documentary targeted on Modi’s management as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat throughout riots in 2002 during which a minimum of 1,000 folks had been killed, most of them Muslims.
Activists put the toll at greater than twice that quantity.
“If now we have a selection of both our folks go to jail or we adjust to the legal guidelines, we are going to adjust to the legal guidelines…” Musk mentioned.
India’s regulatory scrutiny of assorted US tech corporations similar to Twitter, Fb’s WhatsApp and Amazon.com, have harm the enterprise surroundings in a key progress market, prompting some firms to rethink growth plans, Reuters has reported.
Indian authorities have prior to now requested Twitter to behave on content material similar to accounts supportive of an impartial Sikh state, posts alleged to have unfold misinformation about protests by farmers, and tweets important of the federal government’s dealing with of the COVID-19 pandemic.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
