Hyderabad: The demand to bar hate-mongers and those spreading fake news from Twitter is increasing after two popular parody accounts @SirJadeja and @mediacrooks were suspended.
Following this, Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan called for action against writer-academic Madhu Kishwar, whom he dubbed “queen of fake and hate news”. When she criticised Mr Bhushan, Ms Kishwar was called out by fact-checking agencies.
Twitter pointed to the potentially harmful effects of misinformation on civic and political discourse. “We believe that no single actor can or should be the arbiter of truth. It is not possible for us to distinguish whether every single tweet from every single person is truthful or not,” said a Twitter spokesperson.
“We believe that taking down content simply because it is incorrect would ultimately undermine the open democratic debate that our platform is intended to facilitate,” he said.
Some alleged that accounts that were targeting specific parties like the Congress were being suspended. The parody account of @SirJadeja was apparently suspended twice previously.
“It is now a trend on Twitter to suspend accounts and that too selectively. When I ask Twitter for proof of tweets that are detrimental, they don’t have answers and restore it. It is being done by the same people who vouch for freedom of expression”, @SirJadeja said.
