Disgruntled with Twitter’s moderation methods and content rules, a growing number of Indian users are now migrating to a relatively obscure yet similar social media platform known as Mastodon. In recent times, a prominent Supreme Court lawyer in India was suspended from the platform, leading to a sudden surge of users leaving the platform to join Mastodon.
According to a report, it was revealed that several users were under the impression that Twitter has a “highly inconsistent stand” on so-called “hate speech” and similar issues.
Indian users on Twitter are north of 30 million, which is undoubtedly a huge number for Twitter. It has now become apparent that Indian users have felt a growing sense of mistrust against Twitter for a long time now. The aforementioned Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde’s account has been suspended twice already.
While the first suspension came when he retweeted a photo of Nazi Germany dating back to 1936, the second suspension came when Twitter emailed him asking him to take down a retweet of a poem that protested the hanging of two revolutionaries.
In the first case, Twitter restored Hegde’s account but ended up removing the photo. The title of the poem tweeted by Hedge was titled ‘Hang Him,’ which he believes has “triggered some automated bots on Twitter’s backend.”
The above-mentioned two incidents have been in the limelight of the Indian Twitter-sphere and have sparked a discussion about Twitter’s content moderation methods in India.
Moreover, a recent report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) revealed that Twitter removed nearly one million Tweets and has blocked 100 accounts on grounds of “country withheld” policy.
It is to be noted that most of the blocked content on Twitter was critical of the Indian government and its recent dealings concerning Kashmir.
Though prominent organizations and active users believe that Twitter is closing in on content that is critical of the government, Twitter refuses to believe so. The social media company released a statement saying that it doesn’t moderate content based on “ideological or political viewpoints.”
While Mastodon has been trending due to the latest wave of people quitting Twitter to join the platform, only time will tell if there will be any substantial increase of user-migration from one platform to the other.
