After Jack Dorsey, MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar backs Musk's plan to reinstate Trump

Chennai: Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar has called deplatforming as "a violation of fundamental rights of users". This comes after Twitter founder Jack Dorsey backed Elon Musk's plan to reinstate former US president Donald Trump to the micro-blogging site.

"Deplatforming is a big deal - It's a violation of fundamental rights of users and must have force of law behind it for any platform to exercise and must never ever be done arbitrarily," Chandrasekhar tweeted on Wednesday.



Chandrasekhar's comments come after Elon Musk said that if his deal to acquire Twitter is completed he would restore Donald Trump's banned account on the microblogging website. "I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme," he said on Tuesday at the 'Future of the Car' event hosted by the Financial Times.

"This is clearly an expression of the government's belief that deplatforming or taking down any elected head of government or senior government official is a no-no, as far as India is concerned," Prasanto K Roy, a cyber and tech policy expert told ET. "And it's probably also a veiled warning to Twitter or Facebook or anybody not to dream of doing that in India."

The Tesla CEO at the same event, went on to say that he thought the move to deplatform Trump was a "mistake" as it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Trump not having a voice.

Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter following the January 6 Capitol Riots for violating the platform's rules against violence incitement, a decision the company has said was taken by then CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter was the first to ban Trump, post which platforms such as Facebook (now Meta) followed suit.

This comes after the Indian government has reportedly called out Twitter and Meta Platforms for suspending accounts that violate social media giants' community guidelines in filings to a local court, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Twitter's decision to suspend lawyer Sanjay Hegde's account about three years ago violates the Indian constitution and free speech rights, the Ministry of Information Technology said in a court filing last week, according to people with knowledge of the matter, Bloomberg said.

The government's current stance contrasts with a 2019 filing, when it said the matter was for Hegde and Twitter to resolve.

Soon after Musk's comments, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey backed his plan to reinstate Trump's account and even called the platform's decision to ban the former US President as "a failure."

"I do agree. There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behaviour, spam or network manipulation, etc), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don't work, which I wrote about here after the event (and called for a resilient social media protocol)," Dorsey tweeted.