Twitter bans record over 11 lakh accounts in India


Mumbai: Elon Musk-run Twitter banned a record 11,32,228 accounts in India between April 26 and May 25, mostly for promoting child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity.

The micro-blogging platform, going through a churning under Musk who has now appointed a new Twitter CEO in Linda Yaccarino, also took down 1,843 accounts for promoting terrorism on its platform in the country. In total, Twitter banned 11,34,071 accounts in the reporting period in India.

Twitter, in its monthly report in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021, said that it received 518 complaints from users in India in the same time-frame through its grievance redressal mechanisms. In addition, Twitter processed 90 grievances which were appealing account suspensions.

“We overturned 25 of these account suspensions after reviewing the specifics of the situation. The remaining reported accounts remain suspended,” said the company. “We received 29 requests related to general questions about Twitter accounts during this reporting period,” it added. Most complaints from India were about abuse/harassment (264), followed by hateful conduct (84), sensitive adult content (67), and defamation (51). Under the new IT Rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms, with more than 5 million users, have to publish monthly compliance reports.