Indian police probe Twitter over map

New Delhi, India - Indian police have filed preliminary charges against senior Twitter officials over an inaccurate map of the country, an official said on Tuesday, in the latest escalation between the US firm and New Delhi.

Uttar Pradesh state police said the criminal case was filed against two Twitter India officials late on Monday following a complaint from the local head of a nationalist group that the US firm’s website showed the disputed Kashmir region as an independent country.

The map was already taken down from Twitter’s ‘Tweep Life’ career section after an uproar by social media users on Monday against the micro-blogging site.

A police official told AFP that Twitter’s India head Manish Maheshwari and another senior employee were being investigated for breaching India’s IT laws and causing public mischief.

“This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me,” Praveen Bhati from Bajrang Dal, a rightwing Hindu group, said in his complaint. Twitter has been locked for several months in an acrimonious row with New Delhi over new rules for social media companies operating in India.

The regulations require firms to remove and identify the ‘first originator’ of posts deemed to undermine India’s sovereignty, state security or public order.

Last week, India’s IT minister had his Twitter account briefly locked after he posted a video containing music that breached US copyright law.

Ravi Shankar Prasad called the move a ‘gross violation’ and said it showed how his ‘calling out the high handedness and arbitrary actions of Twitter... clearly ruffled its feathers’.