Twitter crosses limits! Locks Ravi Shankar Prasad’s account without any notice, restored an hour later
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New Delhi, June 25: Amid the ongoing tussle between the Twitter and Centre, Twitter on Friday blocked the access of Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad's account and restored it later. Union Minister took to Koo app to ventilate his grievance, and said that social media giant had denied access to his account on grounds 'that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA.'
According to the minister, when he tried to access the account, Twitter blocks his access and sent them a message saying, “Your account has been locked because Twitter received a compliant Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notice for content posted to your Twitter account. Under the DMCA copyright owners can notify Twitter claiming that a user has infringed their copyrighted works. Upon receipt of a valid notice, Twitter will remove the identified material. Twitter maintains a repeat copyright infringer policy under repeat infringer accounts will be suspended. Accruing multiple DMCA strikes may lead to suspension of your account.”
Soon after that social media giant restored the minister's account by posting a warning message to the minister’s account stating, “Your account is now available for use. Please be aware that any additional notices against your account may result in your account being locked again and potentially suspended. In order to avoid this, do not post additional material in violation of our Copyright Policy and immediately remove any material from your account for which you are not authorised to post.”
Reacting to the incident, Ravi Shankar in a thread of tweets, slammed Twitter taking the action without giving any informing about this action. He said that this action by Twitter violates Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 in which he did not tell them before denying access to the account.
He further added that to date, no television channel or any anchor had made any complaints about copyright infringement with regards to those news clips of his interviews shared on social media. Ravi Shankar also accused microblogging platform saying "it's not a harbinger of free speech that they claim to be but are only interested in running their agenda."
"Twitter’s actions indicate that they are not the harbinger of free speech that they claim to be but are only interested in running their agenda, with the threat that if you do not tow the line they draw, they will arbitrarily remove you from their platform, he wrote.
At the last, he warned that 'all social media platforms will have to follow the new IT rules'. "No matter what any platform does they will have to abide by the new IT Rules fully and there shall be no compromise on that.