Hyderabad: Twitter accounts may be suspended because of the use of words such as “kill”, “die”, “moron”, “rape”, and “knife” in tweets.
Many Twitter users say that tweets from as far back as 2014 are also being scrutinised. Twitter is also on the lookout for links to live streams of matches and movie downloads.
Abusive language can get Twitter to block accounts
Vidhya P.’s Twitter account (@books_thief) was suspended last week, and there seems to be no sign of it being reinstated despite she having filed an appeal. “Twitter went through old tweets where I had used certain abusive words. I received a mail stating that I had violated the site’s norms, and so my account was being suspended. I have appealed at the forum for suspended accounts, yet I have received no reply,” she says.
Nani, whose Twitter account (@ Ynakg) had 37,000 followers, was suspended because the system found that he had used the word “kill” in one of his tweets. “It was an attempt to translate a Telugu joke into English. My tweet, which read ‘She will Kill’, was posted in 2015. Twitter sent me a mail calling it a violation,” he says.
Recently, the @WeAreHyderabad acco-unt, which had 35,000 followers, was suspended for posting a video which was considered to be violent.
The site’s bots are looking for instances of sexually explicit or abusive language, defamation of individuals, political parties, nations, or religions, and violent content. However, they are unable to identify words in which some letters are replaced by special characters, such as “r@pe”, “f*ck”, k1ll”, which has given people free reign to use these simple substitutions. Similarly, Hindi wor-ds written in the English script are also not identified. The use of the above-mentioned words does not attract punishment under provisions of the Infor-mation Technology Act either.
Ram Mohan, a senior officer of the Cyber Crime Police Station of Hyderabad, says, “The law only prevents sharing of obsce-ne content on social media. In September this year, the SC struck down Section 66 (A) of the IT Act, which prevented communal violence or gross offence and annoying content, and said that it was unconstitutional. But, according to Section 500 of the Act, an individual can file a case in court if a social media post defames them.”
