Microblogging website Twitter on Friday blocked the official Twitter account of Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for 1 hour.
Twitter said it took this action for violation of American law.
The minister shared screenshots on his official handle after it was unblocked.
"Friends! Something highly peculiar happened today. Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account," he tweeted.
"Twitter’s actions indicate that they are not the harbinger of free speech that they claim to be but are only interested in running their own agenda, with the threat that if you do not tow the line they draw, they will arbitrarily remove you from their platform," he wrote in another tweet.
The message in the screenshot shared by Prasad reads that the account has been locked by Twitter due to DMCA notice. "Your account has been locked because Twitter received a compliant Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") Notice for content posted to your Twitter account. Under the DMCA, copyright owners can notify Twitter claiming that a user has infringed their copyrighted works. Upon receipt of a valid DMCA notice, Twitter will remove the identified material," the message read.
Twitter and the Centre have been at crossroads after the former failed to comply with the government's new IT policy.
It may be recalled that recently, Twitter had removed the blue tick from the accounts of several leaders including Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, after which, a controversy broke out across the country. Twitter corrected it shortly after calling it a technical mistake.
