It appears that the Indian Government has directed ISPs to block parody accounts of the Prime Minister on Twitter. According to a report by The Times Of India, the government, with assistance from ISPs at the local level, has blocked six parody accounts including @PM0India (O replaced with a zero), @Indian_pm and @PMOIndiaa. At the time of writing this posts the handles were inaccessible on Airtel Broadband in Delhi with 'http'. However, these were accessible with the 'https' prefix. We were also able to access these handles on Vodafone 3G. The Times of India report indicates that the Prime Minister's office had written to Twitter in June 2012, to take action against these accounts, however, Twitter did not pay heed to these requests. The Prime Minister's office also told the publication that it did not have a problem with parody but the said accounts were misrepresenting the PM's office, and that one of these accounts tweeted communally- sensitive statements which could trigger a social strife. This follows the recent blocking of 245 web pages with inflammatory and hateful content by the government, following the exodus of a large number of people belonging to the North Eastern ethnic community from cities like Bangalore and Pune, among others. Update: Opposition's View on Parody Accounts & Impersonation Speaking against the open-ended terms laid out in the IT Rules, during a Parliamentary debate, BJP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Arun Jaitley, had commented on parody accounts on Twitter and had said that we were losing…
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