Social media giant Twitter Inc has apologized to an Indian parliamentary panel for ceding the northern Himalayan region to China on Twitter’s geo-tagging Reuters says.
Twitter geo-tagging is currently showing a northern Himalayan as part of China but the company has apologised with a promise to make corrections by month-end, the panel’s chief said on Wednesday. Twitter’s chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran, sent an apology letter to the Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill after the company geo-tagged India’s northern territory of Ladakh as being in neighbouring China, the panel’s head Meenakashi Lekhi said.
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‘They have apologised in writing for hurting the feelings of Indians,’ said Lekhi, also a lawmaker from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “We are committed to protecting assets of India – both physically and digitally’. Twitter has assured the panel that the matter will be resolved by Nov. 30, she added.
Twitter executives last month appeared before the panel to explain the error, with Lekhi accusing the company of disrespecting India’s sovereignty. The mistake came to light after some Twitter users tagged their posts as being in Ladakh but the geo-tag showed their location in China. Twitter at the time said the mistake had been quickly fixed.
Nuclear-armed India and China are currently locked in a months-long military standoff along their contested Himalayan border that includes the region of Ladakh and are currently having bad blood between them after a brief but bloody border war in 1962, and Indian lawmakers and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have been at loggerhead with U.S. tech giants over the territory which is being claimed in full by arch rivals India and Pakistan, with China claiming a portion in the east known as the Aksai Chin.
Lekki last month criticised Amazon, threatening coercive action against the e-commerce giant after it failed to appear before her panel, while Facebook has been questioned by another parliament panel over its content regulation practices.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
