A cornered Twitter finally appoints resident grievance officer in India

With all its options running out, a cornered Twitter, that was anyway legally bound to appoint a resident grievance officer, named  Vinay Prakash for the post. The company in its Help Center section mentioned, "Grievance Officer contact information for users in India: Resident Grievance Officer, Vinay Prakash, grievance-officer-in @ twitter.com, Twitter, Inc." He will replace Dharmendra Chatur who had stepped down from the interim role in June.

Further, Twitter also published its mandatory compliance report for the period of May 26 to June 25 as per the requirement under the new IT rules. For the record, Facebook and Google had filed the compliance report which is now a statutory requirement.

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Over 18K accounts suspended

Twitter, which had taken a hard stance in appointing the grievance officer and publishing the compliance report, lost its legal immunity against user-generated content last week and the Delhi High court conveyed to the Indian government that it can proceed against the microblogging site. As it no longer could brazen it out, a mortified Twitter formally announced the appointment of the resident grievance officer.

The new resident grievance officer's name appears along with Jeremy Kessel, who is the Global Legal Policy Director, and is based in the US. 

According to amended IT rules, social media and streaming companies will be required to take down contentious content quicker and appoint grievance redressal officers based in the country to deal with online content flagged by authorities and courts and assist in investigations.

As required by the law, Twitter has also unveiled its compliance report, and as per it, the microblogging site suspended 18,385 accounts for sharing content related to child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity and and 4,179 accounts relating to promotion of terrorism. 

It took action over 133 links that were shared which were related to various issues ranging from abuse, defamation, misinformation and privacy infringement.

“In addition to the above data, we processed 56 grievances which were appealing Twitter account suspensions. These were all resolved and the appropriate responses were sent. We overturned seven of the account suspensions based on the specifics of the situation, but the other accounts remain suspended,” it said.  

“A vast majority of all accounts that are suspended for the promotion of terrorism and child sexual exploitation are proactively flagged by a combination of technology and other purpose-built internal proprietary tools,” Twitter added.

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