Indian high court dismisses Twitter's plea against government

Indian high court imposes a fine of 5 million rupees on the social media giant

India's Karnataka High Court on Friday dismissed Twitter's plea challenging the federal government's orders to block tweets and accounts and imposed a fine of 5 million rupees ($60,943.65) on the social media giant, a lawyer for Twitter told Reuters.

The decision comes weeks after Twitter's ex-CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey accused India of threatening to shut down the social media in the country unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the handling of farmer protests in 2021, a charge which Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government had called a "lie."

The court ruled that Twitter was served notices, to which it did not comply, India's Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, said in a tweet.

"So you have not given any reason why you delayed compliance, more than a year of delay... then all of sudden you comply and approach the court," the bench said during the verdict, the minister tweeted.

"You are not a farmer but a billon dollar company."

Twitter could not be immediately reached for a comment on the verdict.

($1 = 82.0430 Indian rupees)