Twitter said it does not take any actions based upon political views after BJP social media volunteers wrote to the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology alleging bias against right-wing accounts by the company’s social media platform.
Twitter said there has been a lot of discussion about Twitter and political bias in India in recent weeks and the global real time communication platform today set the record straight. It said its product and policies are never developed nor evolved based on political ideology.
BJP social media volunteers in January said Twitter and Facebook have been systematically trying to curb free-speech of individuals who subscribe to the non-Left-wing ideology by suspending their handles, restricting their reach and removing trends from the trends list. BJP MLA Anurag Thakur, who heads the Parliamentary committee, will examine the issue of “Safeguarding Citizens Rights on Social and Online News Media Platforms” on Monday.
“Twitter does not review, prioritize, or enforce its policies on the basis of political ideology. Every Tweet and every account is treated impartially. We apply our policies fairly and judiciously for all. If there are “false positive” decisions, these are not political statements of intent; they are the basic human error rate of running the fastest, most open conversational tool in history,” said Colin Crowell, Global VP – Public Policy, Twitter.
Twitter said it has a specialized, global team that enforces the Twitter Rules with impartiality. Twitter India employees do not make enforcement decision, and This is by design to ensure fairness and objectivity.
Twitter, along with Facebook and Google, have been accused on a similar anti-conservative bias by U.S. President Donald Trump.
“India is the world’s largest democracy, and one of our fastest-growing audience markets globally. Twitter’s real-time and open nature facilitates robust civic engagement on topics of national and local interest during elections,” Crowell said, commenting on the upcoming General Elections in India.
He said Twitter is committed to surfacing all sides of the conversation as we enter the election season in this extraordinarily diverse cultural, political and social climate.
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