‘Litigant’s hands are soiled’ — what HC said while rejecting Twitter’s challenge to govt orders

Karnataka HC rejected Twitter’s plea against 11 govt orders, said 'no provision in IT Act shows Centre under legal duty to consider request for review of blocking orders'.

Single-judge bench of Karnataka HC rejected plea by Twitter | Commons

New Delhi: Social media has enabled a style of populist politics that, if unregulated, allows hate speech and virulent expressions to thrive in digital spaces, the Karnataka High Court said Friday as it rejected Twitter’s petition challenging the central government’s orders to permanently suspend as many as 11 handles. 

In its ruling, Justice Krishna S. Dixit rejected Twitter’s arguments that the Modi government’s orders — all issued in 2021 and 2022 — to block the accounts were unreasonable and upheld the central government’s powers under the Information and Technology Act to issue blocking orders. Twitter had approached the court in July 2022. 

Refusing to come to the aid of “litigants whose hands are soiled or who are indolent,” the single–judge bench also imposed an exemplary cost of Rs 50 lakh on the company. The amount, he said, should be deposited within 45 days and any delay would attract an additional levy of Rs 5,000 per day.

The microblogging site was challenging 11 such orders issued by the central government — three in February 2021, two in June 2021, five in the second half of 2021 and the last one on 28 February 2022.

“Petitioner is not a poor farmer, a menial labourer, a villager or a novice, who could have pleaded of his inability to understand the objectionability of the tweets and evidentiary material vouching for such objection. It is a multinational IT company whose annual revenue generation is about 5 Billion USD,” the judge noted, while holding the blocking orders were not “disproportionate” as Twitter alleged.

According to the court, these handles had uploaded “objectionable, outrageous, treacherous and anti-national content”, with many of the tweets, pictures, audios and videos displayed on these handles having “abundant propensity to incite commission of cognizable offences relating to sovereignty & integrity of India, security of the State and public order”.

Such orders, the court said, can also be issued to prevent “incitement to commission of any cognizable offence relating to these specified grounds,” besides maintaining sovereignty, integrity of India.

The judge also didn’t agree with Twitter’s argument that users must be given an opportunity to be heard before their accounts are suspended and that, instead of blocking accounts in their entirety, action should be taken on such individual tweets. 

According to Justice Dixit, blocking orders are a “product of institutional deliberations” in which Twitter also participated and that in such matters, a court cannot “run a race of opinions with statutory functionaries”. 

The decision over whether certain information on a social media platform is in the teeth of the law or the rules “essentially belongs to the domain of the executive,” he said. 

‘Ominous pervasion of social media’

In its 109-page verdict, the court also faulted Twitter for challenging the blocking orders on two grounds. First, the court said, the US-based microblogging site had sufficient opportunity to make its representation to the government committee that, according to the I-T Act, recommended that the accounts be suspended. 

Secondly, the judge said, Twitter had “tactfully” delayed compliance of the blocking orders, which he opined, showed the company’s intent to “remain non-compliant to Indian law”.

Justice Dixit saw Twitter’s petition as a belated attempt, especially since some of the blocking orders were made in 2021 and remained uncompiled with for more than a year.  

Twitter had complied with the orders just before approaching the court, the bench said, adding that the orders were passed after adhering to due process of law, were speaking and had “thick nexus” to the objects it sought to achieve.

The verdict also talks about the “ominous pervasion” of the “social media,” which, it says, has been used to “manipulate political choices of voters and opinion generators.” This “perniciously affects, amongst others, the democratic setup of even constitutional institutions”, the verdict says.

In such a scenario, the verdict notes, social media is “highly susceptible to exploitation at the hands of organisations/entities,” perpetrating “mass level psychological and intellectual manipulations”.

Huge propaganda of fake news is taking place on social platforms, which “empowers disruptive voices and ideologies with cascading effect,” the order said.

Keeping in mind that Twitter is a company from a foreign jurisdiction, the court referred to laws from other countries on blocking orders. It found that while in the US protection is not available to speeches that are directed or likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, UK’s Digital Economy Act, 2017, provides for issuance of blocking orders against offending material, such as extreme pornography.

In Australia, it noted, The Online Safety Act, 2021 enacts provisions to regulate warning notice, ‘removal notice’, removal request, remedial notice, etc., in respect of objectionable content of cyber posts.  

‘Purposive, not restricted, interpretation’

The judgement also provides an insight into Section 69A of the IT Act — a law that the central government can invoke to direct blocking of public access of any information on a social media platform. 

Section 69A requires the authority designated under the law and rules to pass writing blocking orders, giving reasons for the action. An intermediary who fails to comply with the direction can be punished with imprisonment for a term that could extend to seven years and also be liable to fine. 

In the verdict, the single bench noted that SC had upheld the validity of section 69A in the landmark Shreya Singhal case in 2015 in which the apex court had struck down section 66 of the IT Act. In that judgement, the top court had held that Section 69A provides for sufficient substantive and procedural safeguards.

The judge also disagreed with Twitter’s contention that the central government couldn’t direct the intermediary to suspend the entire account. The company had argued that the action words ‘generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted’ in the section are in past tense and that blocking of accounts in entirety was, therefore, impermissible.

However, the court rejected this argument and said that every statute needs to be accorded a “purposive interpretation” and not “restricted” or “literal interpretation”. The latter exercise would fail to “effectuate the spirit and larger intent of the Parliament,” the court said.

The judge referred to decisions of the US Supreme Court on interpretation of statutes to hold that even though the words that appear in Section 69A are in past perfect tense, their “verbal form” remains the same even when employed in present perfect or future perfect tense.

It noted that Section 69A was brought on the statute book by way of an amendment in February 2009 because of the “need of the time”. 

“This significant provision has been introduced by the Parliament with the accumulated wisdom gained from years of experience of working of the statute,” the court said, adding that the section’s intent is not merely “penal and curative,” but also “preventive”.

With regard to whether the blocking orders and its reasons were communicated to Twitter, the court held the company was wrong in alleging that they were not informed of them despite their requests.  

The court, which went through a report submitted by the central government, found that the entire evidence based on which the government committee passed its block order was shared with Twitter. In this report, the court said, there were not only translations of the “objectionable tweets” but also the grounds on which they had been found so.

“It is not that one single official functionary of the government, in a fit of anger or anxiety, has made these orders. The statutory committee comprises high functionaries of the government,” the court said, observing no allegation of malafide could be levelled against them.

The court also rejected Twitter’s argument that individual users should be heard before blocking orders are issued, adding that no users whose accounts had been suspended had come forward to complain over infringement of their right.

“It is not that they are all downtrodden members of society or otherwise suffer from some handicap and therefore, they are disabled from working out the remedies on their own,” the court said.

Citing the company’s decision to permanently suspend former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account in 2021, the court said that the central government’s direction to block accounts wasn’t not unusual and that it doesn’t “diminish its simple value”. 

Neither did the court accept Twitter’s argument that the government action amounted to abuse — to this, the court said there wasn’t “sufficient empirical data that supports the argument”.

“No provision in the Act (IT) or in the Website Blocking Rules is pointed out to show that the respondents (Centre) are under a legal duty to consider the request for review of the Blocking Orders. Thus, grievance in this regard, is not justiciable,” the court said.

(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)