Elon Musk’s social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government over its use of takedown orders to request social media content be removed.
Axar.az reports, citing AFP, India, the world’s biggest democracy, regularly ranks among the top five countries globally for the number of requests made by a government to remove social media content.
X’s new lawsuit marks the platform’s latest challenge against the Indian government’s censorship powers and comes as Musk’s Starlink and Tesla prepare to enter the world’s fifth-largest economy.
The case centers around the government’s use of a key legal provision to issue blocking orders, which X alleges bypasses existing safeguards.
“According to X, this provision... is being misused to create an unlawful parallel mechanism for blocking information,” Indian legal news website Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.
The case will be heard by an Indian court in the southern state of Karnataka on March 27, after a brief hearing early this week did not reach a conclusion.