India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblower says

Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by throw93 on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @12:27PM (#32567302)

I think this is related to IT rules India enforced in 2021. More context here. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/twitter-now-in-compliance-...

Indian govt was not happy with the criticism it received on twitter about it's handling of COVID and even forced twitter to delete some tweets. Even tweets asking for help during oxygen crisis were deleted. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483

WhatsApp of all companies put up quite a fight against Indian Govt demand to monitor the messages, although I'm not sure what became of it. Source 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aayushipratap/2021/06/15/whatsa... Source 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/technology/whatsapp-india....

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by secondcoming on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @12:57PM (#32567744)

Why would the Indian Govt need to place a spy in Twitter in order to find things it wants censored?

It's more likely that this person was able to spy on Twitter users' communications, not only in India but all over the world (if we're to believe how bad Twitter's database security policies were)

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by tpmx on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:21PM (#32568087)

Another valuable aspect to the Indian government could have been the chance of getting to the real identities of the "troublesome people" via IP/mobile 2FA phone number records.

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by stjohnswarts on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @10:07PM (#32574194)

This seems like the most likely reason. So they can jail people with anonymous accounts.

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by girishso on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:50PM (#32568523)

> Why would the Indian Govt need to place a spy in Twitter in order to find things it wants censored?

It’s more about targeting the person as an example, so others won’t dare say anything against the government.

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by srean on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @02:13PM (#32568851)

Spot on.

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by nr2x on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:08PM (#32567892)

Gotta get those DMs.

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by butterNaN on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:15PM (#32567995)

When I was on social media, Twitter was pretty much the only mainstream social media which had a sizable anti-rightwing userbase. Could be bacause of that?

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by themitigating on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @03:40PM (#32570317)

Do you have any statistics showing that?

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Re:India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblow... by thunderbong on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @05:18PM (#32571657)

This is what became of it -

"In the largest FDI in the Indian technology sector, US Internet giant Facebook will be buying 9.99% stake in Reliance Industries Ltd’s digital unit Jio Platforms Ltd, for $5.7 billion"

https://indianexpress.com/article/business/companies/relianc...

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