Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter announced on Tuesday that it has launched a lawsuit against the Indian government, the latest salvo in an ongoing fight over the country’s aggressive speech laws. The lawsuit comes after Twitter was ordered to remove a series of accounts and posts that violate Indian obscenity and defamation laws, as first reported by The New York Times. Twitter has now removed the posts, but is seeking judicial protection from such orders in the future.
The fight started last May when India issued new IT rules for online content, shortly followed by a police raid on Twitter’s India offices. The following July, Indian regulators threatened to hold Twitter liable for any future infractions by its users.
Broadly, Twitter has long argued that it…
