Removing that kind of illegal content by the police is 100% different from political officials asking to have content critical of the gov't removed.

The point is that India is a sovereign republic and has its own laws about what is illegal and is not. According to India's laws, spreading false rumours about the police shooting a farmer when there is clear evidence that the person actually died by running his tractor into a barricade is illegal. And when Twitter failed to comply with government's orders to remove these tweets, they didn't have any point of contact from the company they could turn to for accountability. That's why the need for the compliance officer.

Also, criticizing the government is not illegal according to Indian laws.

Who determines that their is "clear evidence". Shouldn't a judge be involved?

>Who determines that their is "clear evidence".

In this case, anyone with an eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgSLaOMEzHY

That video is of such poor quality that it's hard to determine anything from it. Yes, a tractor hit a barrier, flipped, and caught fire. Unclear why it hit the barrier. Did the driver intentionally run it into the barrier? Did the police shoot him and then the tractor continued on into the barrier?

Not saying it wasn't the simple explanation, but that video is not really evidence of anything either way.

Erm, you are requiring the kind of rigor that is needed to establish someone's guilt for establishing someone's innocence. Innocence is the null hypothesis.

The quality of evidence supporting the rumor that the person had been shot by the police was extremely sketchy and the evidence that is available points to the incident being an accident.

Illegal is just whatever the law says is illegal. If you make a law making dissent illegal, then that content is illegal. So now you have to define 'real'-illegal and 'I do not like your opinion'-illegal in the law of some other country.

ok, so removal of obvious illegal content like child exploitation is not equivilent to removal of content like "I don't agree with your political view" -- which is basically IMHO what this hashtag thing in india amounts to...?

> "I don't agree with your political view" > which is basically IMHO what this hashtag thing in india amounts to...?

No, it doesn't. The tweets under that hashtag were spreading a false rumour that the police had shot at a farmer when there was a CCTV footage showing clearly that the said person had died in an accident caused by him running his tractor into a barricade.

I don't quite understand this need to quickly pass judgements on complex politics of a different country, without spending the minimum required time and effort to familiarize yourself with the topic.