Centre's Blocking Power Not 'Tweet Specific', Can Extend To Blocking Accounts; Individual Notices To Users Not Mandatory: Karnataka High Court

The Karnataka High Court on Friday dismissed Twitter's plea against Centre's blocking orders while holding that government is not required to issue notice to individual account holders whose account is to be blocked. A single judge bench of Justice Krishna S Dixit said notice to users of account in terms of Rule 8(1) of the /Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009( shortly "Website Blocking Rules") is not mandatory and in any event, the absence of such notice cannot avail to an intermediary as a ground for assailing the Blocking Orders. “Petitioner being an intermediary, cannot invoke Rule 8(1) as a launchpad of its tirade, when apparently the said Rule is promulgated to protect the interests of only users of account and not others,” it said.Twitter had relied on Supreme Court judgment in the case of Hukum Chand Shyam Lal vs. Union of India (1976) on procedural regularity and argued that as per statutory regime, no Blocking Order can be made without notice to the user whose account is sought to be blocked. It argued Rule 8(1) of the Website Blocking Rules imposes a duty on the Designated Officer to make all reasonable efforts to identify the user of the account.At the outset however, the bench noted that Section 69 of the Information Technology Act provides that Blocking Orders can be made in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, Defence of India, security of State, friendly relations with foreign countries or public order. It can also be made for preventing incitement to commission of any cognizable offence relating to these specified grounds. Rule 8(1) of the Website Blocking Rules prescribes issuance of notice to the user of the account where he is identified or to the intermediary.Accepting the submission of the Central Government that the text of this Rule employs the word ‘or’ occurring between ‘such person’ and ‘intermediary’, Court said the rule maker’s intent is disjunctive and not conjunctive. It added,“Sections 69A(2) & 87 of the Act, amongst other, confer Rule making power on the Central Government; sub-section (3) of section 87 prescribes laying procedure. After being laid, the Parliament has not altered their text, particularly of Rules 8 & 9, to accord with petitioner’s argument. If Parliament intended that both the intermediary and the user of the account should be entailed with notice, it would have simply substituted the word ‘and’ for ‘or’, such a power apparently availing from the very text of section 87(3).” Court also took into account the reasoning offered by the Government that the objectionable contents posted by account users were anti-India and seditious and issuing notice to such users would alert them, possibly making them more aggressive or prompting them to change identity and try to do more harm by spreading more severe content through multiple accounts from the same platform or from other online platforms.It said, "The respondents have offered a plausible explanation as to why they resorted to an extreme measure of blocking accounts in respect of a few users/originators; there were repetitive posts and some originators had behavioural antecedents of repetitive posting or potential and their highly objectionable tweets had a great propensity to incite anti-national feelings.”Court said that Rule 8 prescribes a duty to issue notice to the user of account in view of Constitutional guarantee to free speech under Article 19(1)(a). However, it noted,“None of them (blocked account users) has come forward to complain about the infringement of their rights. It is not that they are all downtrodden members of society or otherwise suffer from some handicap and therefore, they are disabled from working out the remedies on their own. Apparently, they are literate; presumably have more exposure to the outer world, as the very objectionable content of their posts would indicate.”Blocking Not Tweet specificTwitter had argued that Section 69A of the IT Act does not authorize the government to direct an intermediary to block the entire account, rather it is tweet-specific. "There is a marked difference between blocking of a user account and blocking of a tweet; in the former, blocking is ex-post facto in the sense that the information is already available on the portal, whereas in the latter, the blocking constitutes an absolute embargo not only against the existing information but also against all future information that is yet to be generated & posted; this future information could be innocuous," it was argued. However, the Court was of the view that if Section 69A(1) is construed literally, as suggested by Twitter, that would "fail to effectuate the spirit & larger intent of the Parliament.” It said in dealing with codified and statutory law, courts across the civilised jurisdictions have the experience that the words of an enactment more often than not reflect the intentions and aims of its framers...

Centre's Blocking Power Not 'Tweet Specific', Can Extend To Blocking Accounts; Individual Notices To Users Not Mandatory: Karnataka High Court

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