Twitter loses case against Centre's blocking orders, fined Rs 50 lakh

The High Court of Karnataka on Friday dismissed a petition filed by Twitter Inc., challenging several blocking and take-down orders issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, saying the company's plea was devoid of merits.

The single-judge bench of Justice Krishna S Dixit which dictated the operative portion of the judgement also imposed a cost of Rs 50 lakh on Twitter and ordered it to be paid to the Karnataka State Legal Services Authority within 45 days.

Twitter had challenged ten different 'blocking orders' issued by the Ministry between February 2, 2021 and February 28, 2022. The Government had directed the microblogging site to block 1,474 accounts, 175 tweets, 256 URLs and one hashtag, Twitter had claimed before the court while only challenging the orders pertaining to 39 of these URLs.

The Ministry had issued the orders under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. Twitter, in its petition, had however, claimed that the orders "fall foul of Section 69A both substantially and procedurally."

Twitter had claimed that as per 69A, the account holders had to be informed about taking down their tweets and accounts, but no notice was issued by the Ministry to these account holders.

The Government issued notices to the Compliance Officer of Twitter on June 4, 2022 and again on June 6, 2022 to appear before it and explain why the Blocking Orders were not carried out and why action should not be initiated against it.

Twitter replied on June 9 that the content against which it had not followed the blocking orders does not seem to be a violation of Section 69A. On June 27, 2022 the Government issued another notice stating Twitter was violating its directions. On June 29, Twitter replied asking the Government to reconsider the direction on the basis of the doctrine of proportionality.

On June 30, 2022 the Government withdrew blocking orders on 10 account-level URLs but gave an additional list of 27 URLs to be blocked. On July one, 10 more accounts were blocked. Compiling the orders "under protest," Twitter approached the HC with the petition challenging the orders.

Justice Dixit had completed hearing the arguments and reserved the judgement on April 21, 2023. The operative portion of the judgement was pronounced in the court on June 30.