Twitter India offices raided by Delhi Police - What happened?

On Monday evening, the Special Cell teams of the Delhi Police raided the Twitter offices in both Delhi and Gurgaon. This team searched these offices in the hope of finding more about Twitter’s reason for labelling a tweet made by a BJP spokesperson as ‘manipulated media’.

According to a live broadcast by a bunch of different local channels, this team, which also investigates terrorism and a few other malfeasances/crimes, left the offices after about an hour as they were empty and they could not engage with any of the employees as there were none nearby. About a week before, it seems that the Twitter offices had received a notice from New Delhi, after the spokesperson, Sambit Patra of BJP, sent a tweet that the organization labelled as ‘manipulated media’. However, they didn’t receive what they considered as an ‘appropriate response’ and therefore decided to take further action.

Media manipulation is a bunch of techniques by which a person can use social media to fabricate/create a portrayal of an argument/statement to favour their particular interests. Media manipulation can cause a person to stop paying attention to other arguments or can divert people’s attention somewhere else.

It is common knowledge that BJP is India’s ruling party and that Congress is the opposition. In the tweet in question, Sambit Patra has said that Congress is using a supposed ‘toolkit’ to hinder the Indian government's efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic. The Delhi police have said that they had received complaints from Rohan Gupta, who is the head of the social media department of the Congress, and from M V Rajeev Gowda, a national spokesperson for the party. These complaints had been given to them due to the categorisation of the tweet. The police paid a visit to the Twitter offices to give notice of inquiry to the head of the Twitter offices in India.

Chhattisgarh is a Congress-ruled area, and on May 19, they filed a case against Sambit Patra and the former Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh, for the ‘toolkit’ tweets.

The action that the Delhi police have taken is the last in a concatenation of flashpoints in the past six months between the government and the U.S based social media platform over important tweets on a variety of issues.

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