Twitter initially resisted, only obscuring some accounts from view—until its India-based employees were threatened with prison time.
Shortly after, the government took matters into its own hands and shut down internet access in areas where protesting farmers were gathering.
Facebook hid posts containing the hashtag #ResignModi—referring to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi—within India before restoring them in the course of a few hours.
Media censorship was commonplace in India decades before the internet reached its borders, and social media censorship predates Narendra Modi’s rule.
That year, as China’s TikTok became megapopular within India, a local court banned the app for propagating “illicit” content.
Twitter’s India employees remain worried for their lives—and India is pushing its own Twitter-like app, Koo, in order to draw its populace away from the American platform and its rules.
The India that Silicon Valley once so loved has long given way to a different one: an increasingly authoritarian regime that wants even tighter control over information dissemination. »
