Twitter has taken down 52 tweets by Indian users criticizing PM Modi’s handling of the second surge of the covid-19 pandemic after India’s government directive to censor them. These tweets that are now not accessible to Indian users, include posts by Mp Revanth Reddy, West Bengal state minister Moloy Ghatak, Former Journalist Vinod Kapri, Avinash Dash, Actor Vineet Kumar Singh and two filmmakers.
In the past few days, the country has been struggling with the second wave of the pandemic, recording high infections and oxygen shortage cases. According to statistics by world meter, India’s covid-19 cases have surged to over 16.9 million active cases this week with over 192,310 deaths making it the second country with the highest number of infections after the US.
For instance, On Thursday India recorded 314,835 new coronavirus cases in 24 hours with a record high of 2,104 deaths. Oxygen shortage has majorly been the problem across all India’s hospitals.
Twitter users took to Twitter to critic Prime Minister Modi’s leadership and the collapsed healthcare system in the country that has led to the surge in the covid-19 infections in the country. In Delhi’s highest court as reported by BBC, Judges publicly criticized the central government for its handling of the oxygen crisis in the city.
Some also blamed Modi for underplaying the pandemic’s seriousness to an extent of exporting Vaccine doses to other countries.
Twitter in a statement, notified the users of the legal request that they will withhold access to Twitter users in India only.
This means that “if the content violates Twitter’s Rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only. In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so they’re aware that we’ve received a legal order about the account. We notify the user(s) by sending a message to the email address associated with the account(s), if available”
Notably, since the onset of the pandemic, Twitter has been keen on removing tweets that display Covid-19 misinformation especially if they advance a harmful narrative.