Twitter seemingly hid tweets critical of India’s COVID efforts

Be careful who you criticize on Twitter. 

According to MediaNama, an Indian news outlet with a focus on tech policy, the San Francisco-based social media company hid a series of tweets critical of the Indian government’s handling of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Notably, the 52 tweets in question haven’t all necessarily been pulled from Twitter. Rather, the publication notes, many of them are simply no longer viewable in India.

We reached out to Twitter to confirm MediaNama’s reporting, however the company did not specifically address our questions regarding the tweets in question on the record. Instead, a spokesperson made a general policy distinction between when the company removes tweets from the service versus when it hides tweets for certain users. 

“If the content violates Twitter’s Rules, the content will be removed from the service,” wrote the spokesperson in part. “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 pertaining to the account.”

Twitter says that it notifies account holders when their tweets are the subject of an official government complaint. One Twitter user shared a screenshot of an email, allegedly from Twitter, documenting that very process.

The Verge published a list of at least some of the offending tweets, which it found on the Lumen database.

The tweets in question are starkly critical of the Indian government, but are not the kind of COVID misinformation that we’ve sadly become accustomed to in the United States. 

“India will never forgive PM @narendramodi for underplaying the corona situation in the country and letting so many people die due to mismanagement,” reads one of the offending tweets from Moloy Ghatak, a West Bengal state minister. “At a time when India is going through a health crisis,PM chose to export millions of vaccine to other nations” 

According to the World Health Organization, India is in the middle of a massive coronavirus surge. Both cases and deaths have spike over the past month.