India’s Karnataka High Court on Friday dismissed Twitter’s plea challenging the central government’s orders to block tweets and accounts and imposed a fine of Rs 50 lakh, a lawyer for Twitter told Reuters.

The decision comes weeks after Twitter’s ex-CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey accused India of threatening to shut down the social media platform in the country unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the handling of farmer protests in 2021, a charge which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had called a “lie.”

The court on Friday ruled that Twitter was served notices, to which it did not comply, India’s deputy minister for information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in a tweet.

Twitter could not be immediately reached for a comment on the verdict.

The US-based firm had last year asked the court to overturn some government orders to remove content from the social media platform.

This followed an order from the authorities to act on its content — including accounts supportive of an independent Sikh state, posts alleged to have spread misinformation about protests by farmers and tweets critical of the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“So you have not given any reason why you delayed compliance, more than a year of delay... then all of sudden you comply and approach the court,” the bench said during the verdict on Friday, Chandrasekhar tweeted.

“You are not a farmer but a billion-dollar company.”

Last year, in a filing with the top court in Karnataka, Twitter had argued that some removal orders fell short of the procedural requirements of India’s IT act, Reuters had reported.

The country’s IT act allows the government to block public access to content in the interest of national security, among other reasons.

Twitter has been going through a transformative phase since Elon Musk acquired the platform last year, with advertisers slowing spending and the company losing nearly 80 per cent of its staff.

Reuters