Twitter India has a complicated hierarchy where MDs are sales executives, and no one knows about their team members

Twitter is making a mockery of the Indian legal system and fooling the police officials by hiding the information as well as giving wrong information. Delhi Police, which is probing a case against Twitter India for labelling Congress toolkit posted by Sambit Patra as ‘manipulated media’ served several notices to Twitter’s Gurugram office, to which no one replied initially.

The Delhi Police wanted to know whom they need to serve the legal notice in the toolkit case and ask them to cooperate in the investigation. After multiple notices, Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari gave his Bengaluru residence address but when Delhi Police arrived at the place, he told the Police that in Twitter India’s hierarchy, MD is merely a sales executive.

“Manipulation starts at the doorstep of Twitter itself. Twitter should start fact checking its own employees. The senior most employee of Twitter India has misrepresented people at large by announcing Maheshwari as Managing Director, when he claims to be mere sales head when asked to take responsibility,” said a senior source in the government familiar with the facts of the case, as per a report by India Today.

When asked is there someone whom he reports to in India, Maheshwari told the Delhi Police team that “his boss [Sasamoto] is not an employee of TCIPL and he does not know the exact name of the legal entity in which his boss is employed, but his best guess was Twitter Asia-Pacific”. Sasamoto is based in Singapore and was appointed as head of Korea, Japan, and the Asia Pacific a few months ago.

Twitter India is trying to hide as much information as they can about the organizational hierarchy as well as the ownership structure of the Indian subsidiary. A senior government official said, “The final inference is that TCIPL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Twitter International and that the “entire façade of being different entities is to make a mockery of Indian law”.

Twitter has lost safe harbour status as it chose to not comply with new Information Technology rules floated by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology while other companies like Google and Facebook are in the process of doing the same.

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

Now, if the cases are filed against Twitter, as the UP government did in the Ghaziabad case, the Police officials would knock on the doors of the company’s officials, and this is the reason behind Twitter’s attempt to hide its who’s who list.

India has emerged as a global power, which is leading the fight against the hegemony and high handedness of American big tech. While countries like Russia, Australia, France, and others around the world are also pushing back against big tech, India has effectively signalled that it will not shy away from criminally prosecuting the top executives of social media giants, especially those belonging to Twitter Inc.