Almost million tweets on Kashmir blocked at India's behest: CPJ.

Byline: Ramsha Jahangir

KARACHI -- Twitter has blocked nearly a million tweets from accounts that focus on Kashmir at the behest of the Indian government, according to an investigation carried out by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

According to the report published on Friday by the CPJ - an independent organisation working to promote press freedom worldwide - hundreds of thousands of tweets blocked in India since August 2017 under the Twitter's country withheld content policy were shared by accounts that focus on Kashmir.

The CPJ retrieved requests sent by Indian authorities to Twitter between August 2017 and August this year from Lumen, an open database.

The CPJ found 53 letters sent by Indian government to Twitter that asked it to block all, or part of, 400 accounts during the period. Around 45 per cent of those accounts mentioned Kashmir in the handle or bio, or had recently tweeted about Kashmir, according to CPJ's review. Thirteen of the 53 requests listing several hundred URLs were sent by the Indian election commission around the 2019 general election. The remaining 40 were sent by the Indian Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology.

In August this year alone, nine legal requests were sent to Twitter specifying 20 accounts and 24 tweets when the communications blackout in occupied Kashmir began - a considerable spike from the preceding months.

Ninety-three of the 400 accounts were withheld in India when CPJ tested them in September and October.

The vast majority (90pc) of the withheld accounts were from the group that referenced Kashmir, hosting over 920,000 tweets between them, the CPJ found.

It is pertinent to mention that the actual number of demands, tweets and accounts may be much higher as CPJ was able to retrieve requests publicly available in Lumen.

Requests retrieved from Lumen that originated with the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology all cited Section 69A of India's Information TechnoAlogy Act, which authorises government agencies to dirAect intermediaries like TwiAtter to block or remove online content on a range of...