Twitter Summoned By Indian Parliament To Discuss Citizens’ Social Media Rights
With the upcoming elections, Indian officials want to ensure that social media platforms do not meddle with the results. As a precautionary step, Twitter India has been summoned by a parliamentary committee to discuss the topic of “Safeguarding citizens” rights.
The social media platform has been called upon by an Information Technology committee. Anurag Thakur, the head of the committee and a BJP member, tweeted the notice yesterday.
The Parliamentary Commitee on Information Technology will examine the issue:
SAFEGUARDING CITIZENS RIGHTS ON SOCIAL/ONLINE NEWS MEDIA PLATFORMS
MEITY & TWITTER will present their views.
You can tweet/email your views:
[email protected] pic.twitter.com/bDYoSv5OHd— Anurag Thakur (@ianuragthakur) February 5, 2019
The discussion will also be joined by the officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Twitter will be asked how it deals with the complaints of bias news and the technology it has deployed to filter comments on its platform.
The summon has been issued on a complaint by a volunteer group that accused Twitter of being biased against right-wing Twitter accounts. The volunteers that belong to BJP social media also submitted a document in favor of their claims on January 26th.
The submitted document reads, “Twitter and Facebook have been systematically trying to curb free-speech of individuals who subscribe to the non-Left-wing ideology by suspending their handles, restricting their reach and removing trends from the trends list. However, it has been ignoring offensive, abusing and threatening tweets from Left-leaning ideologues and senior leaders of the Congress.”
With general elections scheduled for May 2019, India is gearing up to curb the menace of fake news.
Also Read: Google Chrome Can Now Alert You If Your Passwords Are Hacked
