Aastha Thakur
Published on July 26, 2022 at 20:53 IST
Karnataka High Court issued legal notice to the Central government on a petition filed by Twitter challenging blocking orders issued by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY).
The petitioner submitted the arguments before Justice Krishna S Dixit opposing the blocking orders issued by the Ministry.
The Petitioner counsel Senior Advocate Mukul Rohtagi, representing Twitter has also argued that the direction to block entire accounts falls afoul of Section 69A of the IT Act.
The Court granted the request by the Central government to have proceedings in-camera. The petitioner was also directed to share a copy of all document referred to by them in a sealed cover to the opposite party.
The petition filed before the High Court deals with the ten blocking orders issued by the Ministry between February 2021 and February 2022, directing to block several accounts from access to the public. The same documents were served to High Court as Annexures A to K.
The Twitter contended in its plea that account-level blocking is a disproportionate measure and violated the rights of users under the Constitution. It was further submitted that they fail to comply with the procedures and safeguards prescribed by the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009 (Blocking Rules).
The ambit of ‘information’ that may be blocked under this provision extends only to blocking information that is available and does not extend to preventing information from being generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted.
The plea states that, “…Blocking Orders to withhold access to the entire account cannot be issued without providing cogent reasons as to why such account level blocking in necessary or expedient…account level blocking is a disproportionate measure and violates rights of users under the Constitution.”
Another argument, made was that MEITY has not provided a notice to the originator of the content under Rule 8(1) of the Blocking Rules, as was mandated by the Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v Union of India.