After facing police raids, minister snarks, and weeks of drama, Twitter has finally complied with the new IT laws in India.
The government of India today confirmed to the Delhi High Court that the social network has now fulfilled all requirements of the country’s content policing rules.
The new rules mandated that significant social media intermediaries — platforms with more than 5 million users — need to have had to appoint a nodal officer, a compliance officer, and a grievance officer residing in India.
While the company had an interim grievance officer based in India, there were no other permanent hires made until last month. In July, the social network appointed Vinay Prakash as the resident grievance officer. Plus, it has also appointed a nodal officer and a compliance officer in the last couple of weeks.
Employees in those positions would likely be tasked with tackling public concerns raised about content hosted on the platform, as well as moves like blocking users or content.
Twitter faced a lot of scrutiny for not complying with the new IT rules over the past few months, and at one point, it also faced the danger of losing its safe harbor protection. Because of this non-compliance, police in several states lodged complaints against the platform, and Twitter India’s head, Manish Maheshwari for allegedly failing to control hate speech.
Now that the company has ticked all the boxes for compliance, Twitter might have the government off its back — at least until the next big kerfuffle.