Amid months-long clash with the BJP-led Central government over issues ranging from requests to take down tweets supporting the farmers’ protest, discrediting posts by leaders of the BJP, and more recently new regulation, Twitter has appointed Global Legal Policy Director Jeremy Kessel as the grievance officer for India to follow the center’s new rules for social networking websites.

The development comes a day after Twitter’s interim grievance redressal officer in the country, resigned amid the clashes with the Central government.

Twitter had told the Delhi High Court on May 31 it was appointing Dharmendra Chatur, partner at a law firm that represented Twitter, as the interim officer for the role. But the center had said it could not accept the appointment of outsiders to statutory posts.

However, Chatur resigned on Sunday.

Last week, Twitter India’s Managing Director was sent a legal notice by Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday over a viral video of an elderly man in Loni being assaulted with the intent of provoking communal unrest. Manish Maheshwari, managing director, has been asked to come to the Police Station at Loni Border and record the statement within 7 days.

However, Maheshwari was granted temporary protection from arrest by the Karnataka High Court. If police desire to investigate or question, they may do so by virtual mode, a single-judge bench of Justice G. Narender said.

The government laid down new IT rules in February which came into effect on May 26. Under the new rules, they directed all major social media platforms operating in the country to appoint compliance officers in India, set up grievance response mechanisms, and takedown content within 36 hours of a legal order.

According to the Centre, the new rules are designed to prevent abuse and misuse of platforms and offer users a robust forum for grievance redressal. The social media platforms, if they fail to comply with rules, would result in losing the intermediary status that provides them immunity from liabilities over any third-party data hosted by them.

However, Twitter has lost its legal protection from being prosecuted over users’ posts. Without legal protection, Twitter could be sued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology for any fake news leading it into excessive and spiraling legal hassles.

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In other India news, Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut said the three constituents of the MVA government came together on a common minimum program.

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