Musk's X challenges K'taka HC ruling on content blocking, cites dangers of censorship

S Shyam Prasad | NT

Bengaluru: Microblogging site Twitter has approached the High Court of Karnataka against the earlier order of a single judge bench which had dismissed its petition challenging the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY)’s blocking orders.

The single judge bench of Justice Krishna S Dixit had also imposed a cost of Rs.50 lakh on Twitter in its judgement on June 30. The appeal filed by Twitter (now X Corp) will come up before a division bench of the HC.

Twitter’s main contention was that MeiTY had issued blocking orders under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act without issuing notice to the account holders. The appeal is yet to be listed for hearing by the High Court and has been filed on August 1.

The appeal challenges the imposition of the Rs.50 lakh cost as “unjust and excessive” and has sought an interim relief of keeping it in suspension. X also said that there must be "discernible parameters" to decide why an entire account is being blocked instead of a specific post, highlighting that it might give the government "power to censor future content" in an "untrammeled" manner.

In the submitted document, X emphasized the importance of having "discernible parameters" for determining the complete blocking of an account rather than a single post.

This underscores the concern that such a broad approach could give the government "power to censor future content" in an "untrammeled" manner. Twitter was ordered to pay the fine within August 14 by the single judge bench.

The order had also specified that if Twitter fails to comply, an additional fine of Rs.5000 per day will be imposed on it. Twitter had claimed that the government had between February 2, 2021 and February 28, 2022 issued 10 Government orders directing it to block 1,474 accounts, 175 Tweets, 256 URLs and one hashtag.

Twitter challenged the orders related to 39 of these URLs. The HC single judge bench had framed eight questions and only the question of locus standi for filing the petition was answered in favour of Twitter. The HC had rejected contentions of Twitter and imposed the cost.

The HC had pointed to Twitter not complying with the Government orders.