Twitter has unwithheld columnist Aakar Patel's account for Indian users, days after it restricted access to it without a clear explanation. The company notified Patel by email that the restriction had been lifted on June 13. Patel was the Executive Director of Amnesty International India until last November. Twitter declined to comment. https://twitter.com/Aakar__Patel/status/1271814528368381952 The restriction on Patel's account had come days after he posted a tweet hoping that Dalits, women, and Adivasis in India would protest their conditions like Americans have in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It’s not clear if that tweet is what led to his account being withheld in India, but it’s worth noting that police in Bangalore filed an FIR against Patel for that tweet on June 5. Twitter normally makes legal requests that result in takedowns public, but has not done so in this case, possibly due to a court order received under seal that it is not authorised to share, as the company indicated in the statement it shared last week. Patel has been an outspoken critic of the government. We have filed an RTI with the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, which has routinely ordered posts to be taken down on social media sites, to find out if the government ordered his account’s restriction.The government has increasingly been using Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 to block access to social media links, restricting access to 7,819 URLs in 2019, over double the links it ordered social media companies to remove in 2017. Social media platforms…
