CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE?

SOCIAL MEDIA WARS

- Kaushik Deka

The Narendra Modi government and social media giant Twitter are at loggerheads again. The latest confrontation took place 24 hours before Twitter and other social media platforms— most prominently Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal— missed the deadline to comply with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The Centre had released these guidelines on February 25 and asked the platforms to fall in line by May 25. None of these intermediaries, apart from Indian micro-blogging site Koo, have complied so far.

However, the latest confrontation between the Centre and Twitter is not over the non-compliance issue, but a controversial “toolkit” at the centre of a political slugfest between the ruling BJP and the Congress.

On May 18, a Twitter account, Team Bharat, tweeted screenshots of an alleged “#CongressToolKit” and claimed that it exposed the Congress’s agenda to malign Modi’s image. Within the next few hours, several BJP leaders—including BJP national president J.P. Nadda, general secretary B.L. Santhosh, Union ministers Harsh Vardhan and Smriti Irani and national spokesperson Sambit Patra—had tweeted about the toolkit. The Congress not only called the toolkit fake, but also registered FIRs against BJP leaders in Delhi, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Meanwhile, Twitter labelled the tweets of Patra, Santhosh and some others as “manipulated media”.