Sheikh Saaliq and Krutika Pathi of AP report:
It began in February with a tweet by pop star Rihanna that sparked widespread condemnation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s handling of massive farmer protests near the capital, souring an already troubled relationship between the government and Twitter.
Moving to contain the backlash, officials hit Twitter with multiple injunctions to block hundreds of tweets critical of the government. Twitter complied with some and resisted others.
Relations between Twitter and Modi’s government have gone downhill ever since.
Read more on AP.
At one point, they quote Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation. IFF is somewhat like India’s EFF, and I have had communications with them a number of times over the past few years because Indian entities have tried to censor my reporting on breaches involving Indian companies. IFF was a vocal advocate and supporter of this blogger when I was actually being charged criminally and sued civilly for reporting on one breach on my other site, DataBreaches.net.
The threat of censorship from India is not exaggerated, and India isn’t the only country where if you report on breaches or issues that may impact a company’s reputation, you may find yourself threatened legally. I do not say this to discourage reporting, because it’s never stopped me from reporting, but I realize that at some point, I or my blog(s) may be censored/banned in India. There was a time when my blogs were censored by the Great Firewall of China, but China does not seem to block Cloudflare. In any event, I trust my readers will figure out how to work around censorship if or when it occurs.