Repaying Loyalty with more Loyalty: Leftist journalists jump in to save Twitter

Twitter on Tuesday lost its ‘intermediary’ status after failing to comply with the new IT rules. The US-based company refused to employ a statutory officer in time, despite being granted repeated extensions. This meant that Twitter and its top executives were now open to legal action against them under the penal code of the country for any ‘unlawful’ and ‘inflammatory’ content posted on the platform by any user.

And after the fake news of Loni, Ghaziabad incident went viral on the social media platform and Twitter failed to curb it, unlike dubbing Sambit’s tweet as ‘manipulated media’ — an FIR was consequently lodged by the UP Police against Twitter Inc, its India unit and seven others in connection.

Twitter India managing director Manish Maheshwari has been summoned for questioning within seven days. However, as soon as the news of FIR on Twitter and the left-liberal intelligentsia (Swara Bhaskar, The wire etc.) came to light — the entire cabal, in a swift one motion stood up and started batting for their kin, with Twitter receiving the maximum empathy.

Shekhar Gupta of The Print, infamous for his often ludicrous #50WordEdit once again churned up a good hogwash edit to deflect the entire blame on the government for merely doing its duty.

“Frequent takedowns, labelling and shadow bans nave established that Twitter isn’t a tech platform but is a publishing entity too. This exposes them to legal liability. But FIRS against Twitter, individuals and media organisations is a dangerous overreaction, can curb free speech. Let’s reserve FIRS for intentional, serious crimes,” tweeted Gupta.

Similarly, JNU Hall-of-Famer Shehla Rashid took the dystopian route and once and for all claimed that it was the end of social media as she knew.

Yes, indubitably, it is the end of social media platforms being the unilateral judge, jury and executioners in the country without having to have the liability when things go south.

Now that the government has fixed the liability, the fake news factory of Shehla and her fake donation scams could be unearthed easily and thus she seems agitated.

Then came the biggest hypocrite of the lot, Rajdeep Sardesai who thought he was being cheeky with his ‘tongue-in-cheek’ response. However, a netizen had the perfect response to Rajdeep’s astute reasoning and logic.

Journalist turned nomad Barkha Dutt conducted a whole program with a supposed tech journalist but could not muster a valid, clear and coherent point to diss the IT laws.

It is pertinent to note that no other social media company like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Google has had its ‘immunity’ taken back. It is only because Twitter tried to defy the Indian government’s diktat and thought of it as more powerful than the country that the Modi government had to step up and clip the wings of the Bird app.

Reported by TFI, Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister for Electronics and Information Technology on Tuesday shared the news that Twitter lost its ‘immunity’ granted under Section 79 of the IT Act of the country.

“Twitter was given multiple opportunities to comply with the same, however, it has deliberately chosen the path of non-compliance,” he said whilst adding, “If any foreign entity believes that they can portray itself as the flag bearer of free speech in India to excuse itself from complying with the law of the land, such attempts are misplaced.”

Read More: Twitter loses the intermediary status in India. It will now face criminal liability for unlawful content posted on the platform

The solidarity amongst the liberal brigade is certainly envious. The incestuous level of coordination between one of India’s self-proclaimed fact-checkers Alt News, Twitter, the Congress party and the greater Islamoleftist clique has managed to set agendas and narrative all through the last seven years, however, with the passing of the IT laws, that is surely about to change.