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Over the past four years or so, the Indian government has made thousands of requests to Twitter to remove content that is “anti-national”—a term that has grown in the Narendra Modi era and been popularized by trolls and self-proclaimed jingoists to fuel a brash and bigoted kind of patriotism. Modi, who has been the prime minister of India since 2014, “has very deliberately and systematically built a right-wing online ecosystem that benefits his party,” Pranav Dixit, a technology reporter with BuzzFeed News, told Paroma Soni.
But “while content-removal demands by the Modi administration have come under increasing scrutiny in global media,” Soni writes, “little data exists to track the extent of censorship.” Soni created a series of datasets to try to gauge the “magnitude of the content that the Indian government wiped from Twitter.” She found a stark pattern of acceleration. In 2017, the Indian government asked Twitter to remove 248 tweets. By 2020, the number of demands had risen to nearly ten thousand tweets.
Soni also found that the government’s timing coincided with major events or policy announcements: airstrikes in Kashmir, farmer protests, Covid-19 lockdowns, and more. She also found that more and more topics are being censored—whereas in 2017, most of the censored tweets had to do with Kashmir, the topics grew to include elections, the pandemic, and protests. “I don’t know if there are too many democracies in the world where without a police complaint, or without any sort of evidence of criminal activities, a government can force Twitter to take something down,” Aakar Patel, a journalist and the former director of Amnesty International, told Soni. “But that’s what’s happening in India.” ––Savannah Jacobson, story editor
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