Asia | Blocked and reported!

India, an aspiring digital superpower, keeps shutting down the internet

Connectivity blackouts are damaging to millions of Indians reliant on digital services

An Indian soldier keeps guard outside the main telephone exchange in Srinagar
Image: AP
|MUMBAI

ON July 1st Elon Musk caused a stir by limiting the number of tweets visible to Twitter users in a single day. Perhaps he was inspired by the High Court of Karnataka, a big south-Indian state, which the day before had issued its own argument for restricting tweets. On June 30th the court ruled against Twitter in a case challenging the constitutionality of an Indian government demand, in 2022, to block content and several accounts critical of it. The court fined Twitter 5m rupees ($61,000) for failing to comply with that demand.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Blocked and reported!”

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