Months After Indian Gov't Threatens To Jail Twitter Employees, Twitter Now Blocking Tweets That Criticize The Indian Government

Back in February, we wrote about how the Indian government was threatening to jail Twitter employees if the company wouldn't block various tweets that were critical of the government's handling of farmer protests in that country. While Twitter pushed back, eventually it did block a bunch of content, though it appears it did so reluctantly, and only because it had no other choice.

And now we're seeing it happen again. The COVID pandemic situation in India is a completely out of control, and rather than fix its completely bungled response to the pandemic, the Indian government has been demanding that Twitter block tweets criticizing the government's response.

As first spotted by Medianama, Twitter agreed to block access to 52 tweets for users in India. People elsewhere can still see them, so we can see what kinds of tweets the Modi government doesn't want people to see. Tweets like this:

India will never forgive PM @narendramodi for underplaying the corona situation in the country and letting so many people die due to mismanagement.
At a time when India is going through a health crisis,PM chose to export millions of vaccine to other nations #ModiHataoDeshBachao pic.twitter.com/5sQRfT7kpB

- Moloy Ghatak (@GhatakMoloy) April 20, 2021

Or this:

As India's COVID Cases Hit New High, Tens of Thousands Took A Ritual Bath Togetherhttps://t.co/85gZifK5zb pic.twitter.com/2nEpRIf9cz

- Indian American Muslim Council (@IAMCouncil) April 13, 2021

In other words, it appears that rather than deal with the fact that the government totally failed to deal with the COVID situation, its main focus right now is making sure that people in India can't talk about how badly the government handled all of this.