Acted against 133 posts and 18,000 profiles: Twitter
The grievance redress report, mandated under the new IT rules, covers the period from May 25 to June 26.
In its first grievance redress report mandated under the new social media and intermediary guidelines, Twitter has said it took action on 133 posts for reasons ranging from harassment to privacy infringement and suspended over 18,000 accounts for “child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity”.
The social media firm is in a standoff with the government over compliance with the new guidelines. It told the Delhi high court that it has appointed an interim grievance officer, nodal contact person and compliance officer. “In addition to the above data, we processed 56 grievances which were appealing Twitter account suspensions. These were all resolved and the appropriate responses were sent. We overturned 7 of the account suspensions based on the specifics of the situation, but the other accounts remain suspended,” the report released on Sunday said. The report covers the period from May 25 to June 26.
Also read: Twitter appoints grievance officer
Twitter became the third major social media firm, after Facebook and Google, to release a report in keeping with the rules that the government has asserted it is in violation of, even going so far as to warn that the company has lost immunity from prosecution for third party content.
“In compliance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, Twitter is required to publish a monthly compliance report which includes the details of complaints from users via the India grievance mechanism and action taken on them, as well as information related to Twitter’s proactive monitoring efforts under the IT Rules. This inaugural report covers the reporting period from May 26, 2021 through to June 25, 2021. Going forward, we will be publishing this report on a monthly basis, and we are committed to making improvements over time, based on feedback received from the government, or in accordance with internal changes that allow for us to provide more granular data,” Twitter said.
Twitter suspended 18,385 accounts for child sexual exploitation and 4,179 for promotion of terrorism. “Proactive monitoring refers to content proactively identified by employing internal proprietary tools and industry hash sharing initiatives,” the firm said in its report.
Facebook removed a little over 30 million pieces of content – posts, profiles pages – between May 15 and June 15 in India, the company said in a first action-taken disclosure.
The links taken down related to content that was violent and graphic, contained adult nudity and sexual activity, and suicide and self-injury. The report released on Friday is an interim disclosure and the company said it will publish details on July 15.
Facebook-owned Instagram said it took action on two million links across nine categories in the same period. Another Facebook company, WhatsApp, has challenged the IT rules over the traceability clause.
“Facebook’s India-specific numbers are more detailed than offered to other countries,” a person familiar with the matter said. “The list of categories is not exhaustive”. According to the social media firm’s last quarter transparency report, from January 2021 to March 2021, it took action on 31.8 million URLs for adult nudity, while in India the number stood at 1.8 million for the month.
In terms of graphic and violent content, the company proactively took down 34.3 million posts, pages and profiles, of which India’s number for May 15 to June 15 was 2.5 million.
