Twitter's interim grievance officer for India quits amid disagreement with Centre: Report

Twitter again has no local grievance officer in India as Dharmendra Chatur, who was recently appointed, has reportedly quit amid the ongoing row with the government.

Amid the ongoing row between Twitter and the Union government, Twitter's interim resident grievance officer for India has stepped down, news agency PTI has reported. The San Francisco-based microblogging company, which is under fire in India for not "complying" with local rules, did not comment on this development, the news agency said. This one again leaves Twitter without any local officer, while keeping a local officer for grievance redressal is a mandatory provision under the new IT rules of India.

Complying with the new I-T rules, Twitter recently appointed Dharmendra Chatur as an interim local grievance officer. (AP)

For long, Twitter did not have any grievance redressal officer in India. As the government mandated that all social media intermediaries operating in India will have to mention the name of the resident grievance officer on their sites, Twitter appointed Dharmendra Chaturas the interim grievance officer. But now his name is no longer displayed on the site, PTI reported.

How an AR Rahman song got IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad blocked from Twitter

The disagreement between Twitter and the Centre has been going on since January this year when the government asked Twitter to take action against accounts that trended #farmersgenocide during the farmers' tractor rally on Republic Day. As the row escalated in the following months, Twitter temporarily removed the 'verified' badge from President Ram Nath Kovind's personal Twitter account and from several accounts of RSS leaders including Mohan Bhagwat's. Then it flagged a tweet of BJP leader Sambit Patra as manipulated media and very recently it blocked IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad's Twitter account for an hour over alleged copyright infringement.

Parliamentary panel on information technology, headed by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, recently met Twitter India's public policy manager Shagufta Kamran and legal counsel Ayushi Kapoor and said that the platform has to follow the rule of the land. The committee will seek an explanation from Twitter for locking out the I-T minister, Shashi Tharoor said adding that the same happened with him as well.

Meanwhile, the microblogging platform has lost its intermediary status in India and is now editorially responsible for what users post on the platform. After this, Ghaziabad Police lodged an FIR against Twitter over an incident that took place in Loni, for which Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari was called by the Ghaziabad Police to join the probe, but Karnataka high court has granted Maheshwei relief and said that no coercive action can be taken against him.