Cops begin ‘lengthy’ process of getting Raj children’s fake Twitter accounts blocked for Indian users

Earlier this month, MNS had registered a complaint with the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell (CCIC) of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch about two allegedly fake accounts in the name of Amit and Urvashi Thackeray, through which derogatory content about some political personalities had been posted on Twitter.

The CCIC, in order to make sure that the offensive content does not lead to any law and order problems, sent a request to Twitter asking it to block the two accounts. Twitter, however, did not cooperate. The CCIC officials claimed that while Facebook complies with requests to block offensive accounts, Twitter does not.

DCP (Detection) Dhananjay Kulkarni said, “We have now sought permission from the court to block access to the two accounts in India through the CERT, which is based in Delhi. This, however, is a lengthy process, and the accounts and their posts will still be accessible to anyone when viewed from servers outside India. Once we get the court order, we will write to CERT,” he said.

The police have frequently faced obstructions to their investigations due to the reluctance of websites with servers based in foreign countries, which claim that they do not fall under the purview of Indian laws.

N S Nappinai, an expert in cyber crime law, said, “Regardless of where its servers are based or where the offensive accounts are created from, if the consequences are faced in India, Twitter should cooperate with Indian laws.”

Cyber expert Vijay Mukhi added, “The aspect of ‘no censorship’ has always been Twitter’s selling point. Its claim is that if they start censoring, it would lead to the question of where to draw the line, which is why they do not draw any line at all. They are trying to match Facebook in terms of users.”

gautam.mengle@expressindia.com