Twitter-ministry hearing in Karnataka HC adjourned till August 25

The Karnataka High Court will hear Twitter’s plea against the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY’s) content takedown notices on August 25. The plea, listed for hearing on Tuesday, was adjourned as the counsel for the central government was unavailable.

During the hearing, the counsel for Twitter told the Karnataka high court it had received notices to block nearly 1,100 accounts without providing any reasons to the platform or the account holders.

Earlier this month, Twitter had approached the Karnataka HC with a plea challenging the blocking of at least 39 such accounts and content, including some dating as far back as February 2021, on the grounds that they do not pass the test of “proportionality”.


This came shortly after the IT ministry had issued a notice to Twitter, giving it a "last chance" to comply with all the notices and takedown orders issued under provisions of the IT Act or risk losing its intermediary status and, thereby, the protection accorded under Section 79 of the IT Act, ET has exclusively reported on June 29.

In all, MeitY ordered the social media intermediary to block 1,474 accounts, 256 uniform resource locators (URLs), 175 tweets, and one hashtag between February 2, 2021, and February 28, 2022, the company told Karnataka HC in its petition.

In its submission to the court, the company also said the IT ministry had – as recently as June 2022 – issued further orders asking it to block 10 accounts and 27 URLs. Subsequently, these orders were withdrawn following meetings between Twitter’s chief compliance officer Vinay Prakash and ministry officials, the intermediary stated in its court petition.