IT Ministry replies to Twitter, via homegrown app Koo

New Delhi: The war between Twitter and the Indian government intensified on Wednesday after the IT Ministry went to the homegrown Twitter-like platform called “Koo” to reply to Jack Dorsey-led platform, saying this is unusual for the micro-blogging platform to release a blog post over the removal of several accounts related to farmers’ protests.
Twitter on Wednesday morning said that it has taken a range of enforcement actions, including permanent suspension in certain cases, against more than 500 accounts escalated across orders from the Indian government for clear violation of its rules.
However, the company said that it does not believe that the actions it has been directed to take by the IT Ministry are consistent with Indian law.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), in a post published on Koo, replied: “Upon the request of Twitter seeking a meeting with the Govt., the Secretary IT was to engage with senior management of Twitter. In this light a blog post published prior to this engagement is unusual. Govt. will share its response soon”.
Over the course of the last 10 days, Twitter has been served with several separate blocking orders by MeitY under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.
Twitter said that out of these, two were emergency blocking orders that “we temporarily complied with but subsequently restored access to the content in a manner that we believe was consistent with Indian law”.