Elon Musk is facing allegations of complicit with state censorship after appearing to side with India’s government in a turbulent free speech battle over a documentary criticizing the country’s prime minister.
The fight revolves around a new BBC documentary that focuses on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing the politician of allowing religious-based violence against Muslims. India is a majority with a majority Muslim minority.
The Modi government said it has ordered social media platforms, including Twitter, to censor posts about the documentary, what it calls “Hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,” and Twitter has blocked some of the tweets from being viewed within India, according to screenshots of notices posted by Twitter users this week.
“This tweet by DerekBrynMP has been blocked in India in response to a legal demand,” read a notice Posted by Derek O’Brien, Member of the Parliament of India. The notice appeared in place of a tweet about the documentary, according to O’Brien’s screenshot.
Kasturi, the tech billionaire who bought Twitter last year and calls himself a free-speech despot, broached the subject in a tweet on Wednesday without making any promises about what he would do.
“First I Heard,” Musk wrote in response to a question From Canadian lawyer David Freiheit.
“It’s not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter around the world overnight,” he said, referring to several companies that run Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.
Musk’s brief reply was in contrast to the sometimes detailed, personal responses he has given to other people who complain to him about Twitter. “Complaint Hotline Operator Online! Please mention your complaints below,” he Tweeted in November.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment, but a backlash is building against the San Francisco company’s apparent decision to comply with India’s demand.
“Self-proclaimed free-speech autocrats like Elon Musk should speak up. Bypassing Twitter post [the] In the BBC documentary, Musk has made it clear that for him, profit matters more than human rights, Rasheed Ahmed, executive director of the Indian American Muslim Council, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Modi’s opponents have accused him of inaction over the years, including violent Hindu nationalism Massacre of over 1,000 Muslims In 2002, when he was the head of the Indian state of Gujarat. Modi The allegations have been called stigma,
Actor John Cusack was also among those who criticized Musk. Call Calling him “the real profile in funky.” Cusack, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2016 co-authored a book With Indian novelist Arundhati Roy on government surveillance.
Mathieu Yeglesias, a journalist with a daily newspaper popular Inside the Biden administration, they said they fear what Musk might do to other hardliners like Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“If he is willing to do this for an Indian prime minister, consider Xi’s influence,” he said. wrote, (China is serious For Tesla’s car business.)
Indian authorities continue crackdown on BBC documentary on Wednesday after police detain students in Delhi as they gathered to watch the motion picturecalled “India: The Modi Question”, Reuters reported.
It’s not unheard of for tech companies to block content locally in response to an order from a court or other authority. in a transparency report Prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the company said it received 47,572 local requests to remove content during the second half of 2021; 97% of them were from five countries, the company said: Japan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey and India. Within India, Twitter said this compliance 5.6% of the time.
Lumen, a Harvard University-based database that aggregates government censorship requests issued to tech platforms, Told in a blog post on Monday that it received a copy of the order of India to Twitter.
India’s order also applied to YouTube, and YouTube removed some copies of the documentary from its website and app. But YouTube said it acted in response to the copyright-related demand, and on Wednesday the BBC said it had also requested the removal of clips from websites and platforms that infringed the BBC’s copyright.
The Internet Archive also removed copies of the documentary, showing a notice instead that the items “may be removed for a variety of reasons.” The archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the BBC said it had made no such request to Twitter.
“The BBC has not asked Twitter to remove any content relating to the documentary,” the British broadcaster said in a statement.
The BBC has only broadcast the documentary in the United Kingdom and has not yet licensed it to any third party streaming services.
Raman Cheema, a former Google employee who is now a lawyer for Access Now, a human rights organization, said that the Indian government’s actions show that human rights in India are at risk.
“IT regulations are being exploited, handing over authorization licenses to pressure platforms to censor content in ’emergency’ cases,” he said a twitter thread,
Cheema said, “These removals underscore the rapid expansion of state censorship in India.”