As many as 1,122 URLs blocked on Twitter, IT minister tells Lok Sabha

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ordered Twitter to ban 2,851 URLs or unified resource locators in 2021 and 1,122 till June this year under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. according to statistics shared by the government in the Lok Sabha.

In the interest of national security, Section 69A of the Act permits the government to restrict public access to content.

According to data shared by Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the IT ministry's orders to ban Twitter URLs have been steadily increasing since the Modi administration took office in 2014.

The minister was answering to a question from Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi, who had asked for a year-by-year breakdown of government requests to suspend or decrease the visibility of Twitter accounts, as well as the grounds for such decisions, dating back to 2014.

The number of blocked URLs climbed from 8 in 2014 to 15 in 2015, 194 in 2016, and 588 in 2017 before declining to 225 in 2018. The government blocked 1,041 URLs in 2019. The number increased to 2,731 in 2020 and 2,851 in 2021.

In April last year, he Center had asked Twitter to remove account that had criticised how the government handled Covid-19 during the second wave, which claimed thousands of lives.

The High Court issued a notice to the Centre on Tuesday and ordered Twitter to give the government's attorney a sealed copy of all pertinent papers.