The framing of the blocked tweets as ones that criticized the government seems false to me thus far. From what I read only a small number (~50) tweets were removed, ostensibly for inciting violence or panic, via misinformation. The example messages I saw in some articles included fake images from unrelated situations and things of that sort. This seems like what is typically considered reasonable removal of misinformation, but has been framed as censorship by news media. This doesn’t make sense to me as an outsider, since clearly there are millions of tweets happening and a very small number were blocked - if censorship were the goal a much larger number of messages and accounts would need to be blocked.
So then this makes me question why there is so much outrage about this action. Those spinning up this outrage are likely ideologically opposed to the current ruling party in India, and are making an effort to undermine them politically. What has followed, like clockwork, is Western leftist news media and social media amplifying this messaging as much as possible. This is in keeping with the anti-India / Hinduphobic attacks we see regularly here in America in articles criticizing Modi or “news” segments run by outrage dealers like John Oliver.
As a related aside: it’s amazing to see all the American based news sites (Vox, TechCrunch, etc) run this story when they also regularly express support of tech companies practicing censorship per Silicon Valley political biases. Hell, a sitting US legislator (AOC) called for Parler to be kicked off the Apple and Google app stores (a violation of the first amendment), and many here on Hacker News cheered it on, under dubious claims that Trump incited violence even though Twitter’s own blog post on Trump’s permanent ban did not prove anything of the sort (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...). Clearly a double standard is being exercised between America and India.
To be clear I do not support censorship personally. I am for something closer to absolute free speech and letting people figure out what they want to trust and distrust, rather than ceding control to EITHER governments or massive multinational tech corporations. But the hypocrisy here is astounding. When I see manufactured stories like this, I can’t help but think back to what Macron and his government warned about when they discussed the danger of American social media and the “intellectual matrix” coming out of the US (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...).