New Delhi, Aug 1 Delhi High Court on Tuesday recused itself from hearing a batch of petitions challenging the suspension and deletion of accounts by social media platforms.
Justice Subramonium Prasad cited his personal relationship with petitioner lawyer Sanjay Hegde as the reason for stepping down from the case.
The pleas have been listed before another bench for further hearing on August 7.
The case pertains to seven petitions filed by various account holders who are challenging the suspension and deletion of their accounts on social media platforms, most notably Twitter.
One of the petitioners, Wokeflix, whose Twitter account was suspended and later deleted on grounds of promoting hate speech, has accused Twitter of having double standards.
They alleged that Twitter allows Hindu sentiments to be treated harshly while being gentle with sentiments from other communities.
Furthermore, Wokeflix accused Twitter of ‘aiding and abetting in the normalisation of genocidal tyrants like Aurangzeb’.
Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, another petitioner, had approached the high court in 2019, seeking guidelines under the Information Technology (IT) Act to ensure that social media censorship aligns with the Constitution.
His Twitter account was permanently suspended on November 5, 2019, allegedly due to two retweets he made.
Hegde demanded restoration of his account, arguing that Twitter performs a public function of high public interest, making it subject to the high court's jurisdiction.
In response, Twitter maintained that it does not primarily serve a public function and that its services are contractual, subject to the Information Technology Act's grievance redressal mechanism. They claimed that Hegde's petition was not maintainable under this act.
The two posts that led to Hegde's suspension were related to a tweet by Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA) and member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML).
One of the posts included a poem by Gorakh Pandey titled 'Unko phaansi de do', while the other featured a picture of August Landmesser, a German shipyard worker known for refusing to perform the Nazi salute.
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