Twitter will hire a liaison officer with the Election Commission of India, reports Reuters. This follows a government IT Committee meeting, which gave Twitter 10 days to respond to its questions. Twitter’s global head of public policy Colin Crowell, who represented the company at the committee, said that the Indian election was a top priority for the company. “So making sure that we have personnel in position to do that, whether we call that a nodal officer, we’ll make sure we’ll have what the Election Commission needs,” Crowell told Indian Express. Twitter will also have a process and mechanism to address (unspecified) issues during the election period. Further, it is in the process of hiring a country head for India, Crowell said, without specifying a timeline. More notes from the interview: Crowell said that Twitter would ensure that only one hashtag is contributed from every account, in order to address the manipulation of ‘Trending Topics’ on Twitter He added that the company may come up with bespoke rules for its "trust and safety" policy for certain countries On Twitter’s low compliance with legal requests from the Indian government, Crowell said that conveying legal requests for user info is pursuant to the Mutual Assistance Legal Treaty (MLAT) signed between the US and India: "The difference is that in the US, our established process is consistent with the fact that our user information is there and present, and we have an established process with warrants to convey user information to law enforcement authorities. In India,…
