X Expands Community Notes to India: Allowing Indian Contributors Ahead of Indian General Election
Elon Musk owned X (formerly Twitter) announced on April 4 that Community Notes, a crowd-sourced fact checking program, has now started allowing people from India to join. This comes just weeks before the General Election in the country.
Here is what the announcement read:
With the General Election just right around the corner, it is an important expansion of a feature that will counter fake news. During election campaigns, there is going to be debate on controversial topics and X is at the center of many such debates.
With over 26 million users in the country, India is the third biggest region for X by number of users. These users in India turn to Twitter/X to check out the latest news updates on various topics like politics, sports, and entertainment.
The platform has seen some critical debates and controversial topics of late, which prompted the Indian government to call on the company to ban certain users or conversations.
India is a different ballgame for X as it presents a difficult challenge for the company. From time to time, the Indian government has asked the company for a ban on certain things. Over takedown requests, the company and the government clashed on many occasions. The Modi regime requested the company multiple times to remove posts that it views as incendiary.
Last year, the government also forced the company to remove a BBC documentary that was critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The documentary was banned in the country and that is why X was forced to remove it.
