Twitter Shares Distorted Map Of India On Its Website, Shows J&K And Ladakh As Separate Countries

Twitter has shared a distorted map of India on its website which shows Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh which is an integral part of India as separate countries.

New Delhi: Twitter has fueled another controversy as its website shows a distorted map of India on the career section on its website. The map that appears on the ‘Tweep Life’ section shows Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh detached from India.

Sources have confirmed that the Centre will issue a strict notice to Twitter regarding this matter to remove the distorted map or actions will be taken against the microblogging platform.

This is not the first time that the social media platform has shown the wrong map of India. In November r 2020, national security analyst Nitin A Gokhale found that Twitter had labelled the Indian territory of Leh in Ladakh as part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Gokhale, the founder of Strat News Global, had marked his location as ‘Hall of Fame Leh’. However, the microblogging platform displayed the area as a part of PRC. The screengrab of the video read, “Nitin A Gokhale was live. Jammu and Kashmir, People’s Republic of China.”

The government of India issued a warning to CEO Jack Dorsey over the misrepresentation of the Indian map and later Twitter India issued an apology and removed the images and related tweets.

Twitter is already in a tussle with the government of India over compliance with the New IT rules.

Twitter has already lost legal protection in India when the government stripped it of its intermediary status. This means that Twitter will not be considered as a platform hosting people’s tweets but it will be editorially responsible for the content.

On June 20, India's permanent mission at the United Nations had clarified that India's new IT rules are "designed to empower ordinary users of social media" and that they were finalised after the government held broad consultations with civil society and other stakeholders in 2018.

The Central government has framed the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 ('new IT Rules'), and notified the same on February 25, 2021. The Rules have come into effect from May 26, 2021.