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Ghaziabad Viral Video Case: UP Police Issue Notice To Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari, Summons Him For Questioning

Swarajya Staff

Jun 18, 2021, 09:33 AM | Updated 09:33 AM IST


Twitter
Twitter

The Uttar Police (UP) has sent a notice to Twitter India's managing director Manish Maheshwari, summoning him to appear before a police station in Ghaziabad for questioning regarding a recent viral video of an alleged attack on an elderly Muslim man, reports Economic Times.

Issued on Thursday (17 June), the notice asks Maheshwari to appear before the police station within seven days of the receipt.

As per the Ghaziabad Police, microblogging social media platform Twitter failed to flag or delete the posts related to the case even after they issued clarifications negating the alleged communal nature of the crime, thus contributing to the flaring up of religious tensions.

It should be noted that this marks the first instance of a police complaint being filed against Twitter in India since it likely lost its intermediary status due to non-compliance with the new information technology (IT) rules, making it liable for prosecution under the IT Act as well as the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The development comes as Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad had too slammed Twitter recently over failure to act on the case in UP.

"What happened in UP was illustrative of Twitter’s arbitrariness in fighting fake news. While Twitter has been over-enthusiastic about its fact-checking mechanism, its failure to act in multiple cases like in UP is perplexing & indicates its inconsistency in fighting misinformation," Prasad had said.


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