A committee atwitter over little substance

A committee atwitter over little substance

The current controversy on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s nonappearance before Parliament’s standing committee on IT is as driven by histrionics as many controversies that erupt on Twitter. Leave aside the logic of the committee’s complaints against Twitter for the moment and ask whether Dorsey’s presence at the committee’s meeting would have achieved anything other than political theatre. Standing committees in India are not empowered to take testimonies under oath, nor do they have quasi-judicial or quasi-regulatory powers. The Twitter CEO, therefore, simply could not have promised any change in its rules of business, because a standing committee is not the place for such a deliberation. The policymaking ministry, relevant regulators and courts are the forums where private companies’ business conduct should be reviewed. This, and not whether there was enough time for the Twitter CEO to fly to India, is the fundamental problem with the standing committee’s ‘summons’ to Dorsey.

Grandstanding is not the only issue with the standing committee’s approach. It has decided that the appearance of many fake Twitter handles and related unsavoury social media conduct make a case for questioning the company’s internal controls. This is, to put it mildly, a strange conclusion. Twitter has hosted fakery and dangerous nonsense pretty much from the time it came up. What’s so especially appalling now compared to, say, what Twitter hosted six months or five years back? Opposition arguments that the BJP-majority committee’s argument is informed by partisan views on current social media chatter don’t seem fanciful.

This is not to say Twitter, like other social media platforms, can’t do more to police its content. Just that the standing committee is asking the wrong question for wrong reasons.