NEW DELHI: Twitter on Tuesday challenged the Indian government in court over its recent orders to take down some content on the social media platform, media outlets reported.
The lawsuit was filed in the Karnataka High Court in southern Bengaluru city and comes after the Indian government in February warned company executives of criminal action if they failed to comply with the takedown orders, the Press Trust of India and the Bar and Bench legal news site reported.
A Twitter spokesperson, Aditi Shorewal, declined to comment or specify what type of content the company was told to block. She did not confirm that Twitter had filed the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is part of a growing confrontation between Twitter and New Delhi after the Indian government last year passed a new set of sweeping regulations giving it more power to police online content.
The new rules require companies to erase or block content that authorities deem unlawful. Under the laws, employees of social media websites and technology companies can be held criminally liable for failing to comply with the government’s orders.
“It is everyone’s responsibility to abide by the laws passed by the country’s Parliament,” India’s IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told reporters Tuesday, when he was asked about the lawsuit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has sought for years to control social media and has often directed Twitter to take down tweets or accounts that appear critical of his party and administration.
Twitter complied with most of those orders in the past but also resisted others and has called the new rules a “potential threat to freedom of expression.” The company has removed content related to anti-government farmer protests and tweets criticizing the Modi administration’s handling of the pandemic.
The Indian government has called the new rules necessary to tackle disinformation, hate speech and other troubles. Officials have warned Twitter that non-compliance with the rules could mean that the company would lose its liability protections as an intermediary, meaning Twitter could face lawsuits over content.
Relations between the Indian government and Twitter have been thorny since the laws were passed.
In May last year, police raided Twitter’s office after the company labelled a tweet by Modi’s party spokesman as “manipulated media.”
That same month, WhatsApp sued the Indian government to defend what it said was its users’ privacy and stop new rules that would require it to make messages “traceable” to external parties. That case is still pending in an Indian court.
Experts have criticized the new rules and said they amount to censorship. They have also accused the Modi government of silencing criticism on social media, particularly Twitter. Modi’s party denies the claim.
Police in New Delhi last week arrested a journalist over a tweet from 2018 that an anonymous Twitter user alleged was hurtful to sentiments of a “particular religion.”
Twitter challenges India order to block content
https://arab.news/9n3x9
Twitter challenges India order to block content
- The company has removed content related to anti-government farmer protests and tweets criticizing the Modi administration’s handling of the pandemic
Transparency is key to trust, says CNNIC exec
- Cathy Ibal outlines CNN’s multi-platform strategy and approach to AI amid shifting audience habits
DUBAI: Overall trust in news has stayed stable for the third year in a row at 40 percent, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025.
Yet the news industry is growing more fragmented as engagement with traditional media sources such as TV and print declines and audiences turn to social media and video platforms for news, the same report found.
In this environment, Arab News spoke to Cathy Ibal, senior vice-president of CNN International Commercial, about the evolving nature of the news, particularly broadcast, industry.
CNN recognizes the shift in “the way that people access, consume and engage with news media,” and has adapted as a network to be present across various channels including TV, digital, mobile, and social media, among others, she said.
While CNN is synonymous with “breaking news,” “which is when we have our largest audience spikes and interest,” she said that it is part of the network’s mission “to be essential to people every day” through content across varied topics including business, technology, and health.
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In the Middle East region, CNN audiences are 1.5 times more likely than the global average to engage with the network via social media and mobile apps, according to research by Differentology.
They are also 1.5 times more likely to rely on user-generated content as a primary news source compared with the global average.
CNN is “acutely aware of the dynamic nature of content consumption in the Middle East,” where a significant proportion of the population is under the age of 30, resulting in “an accelerated take-up of new technology, and therefore ways of consuming news media,” Ibal said.
“To that end, we have a considerable content offering for and about the region,” she added, referring to shows such as “Connect the World” with Becky Anderson and “CNN Creators,” as well as CNN Arabic.
Despite changing audience behavior, Ibal believes there is something “uniquely powerful” about traditional TV, from both an audience and advertiser perspective. Ultimately, a multi-platform approach allows the network and advertisers to connect with more diverse audiences in different ways.
One of the key focuses of the network’s branded content studio, Create, for example, is content strategy. “The same piece of content cannot simply be created for one platform and reused on others,” Ibal said.
“We always say that powerful storytelling must be at the heart of a well-performing campaign. The role of content strategy is to determine how to best tell that story in different native environments.”
Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming more commonplace in the newsroom, with approximately 81 percent of journalists using AI tools in their work regularly, according to a 2025 global study.
Still, audiences remain skeptical about the use of AI in news. Only 12 percent of respondents are comfortable with fully AI-generated news, rising to 43 percent when a human being leads with some AI help, and 62 percent for entirely human-made news, according to the same study.
The key to earning and maintaining trust, according to Ibal, is transparency.
Commercially, CNN has used automation and machine learning for many years, specifically for audience targeting and personalization, as well as to automate time-consuming tasks in its branded studio and to analyze large data sets for audience insight and campaign evaluation.
Editorially, the network’s approach to using AI is “rooted in responsibility and transparency,” Ibal said. With major global events, such as elections, coming up, CNN is investing in areas such as AI-driven fact-checking and misinformation detection tools that identify manipulated images, deepfakes, and misleading content before it reaches audiences, she added.
Ibal said: “Any use of AI across CNN — whether for commercial, editorial or product development — must adhere to our standards and practices and strict AI guidelines to ensure our audiences and brand partners can always trust our work in this area.”
