(Image source from: theweek.in)

Twitter India is planning to hire and appoint officer who can mediate with Election Commission, After concerns over political misuse of the social media platform ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

In an interview to Reuters, Colin Crowell said that the Indian Elections are company’s top priority.

He also appeared before the Parliamentary committee where the panel asked the company to engage more with the Election Commission to assist and ensure a free and fair election in India without any Foreign Interference.

Crowell Twitter's global head of public policy said he had told the committee that “we will certainly have a process and mechanism in place to address issues that will arise during the election period.”

In recent times India has stepped up to tackle and crackdown the fake news on social media applications.

All the social media platforms came under governments scrutiny to curb the menace of fake news. Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have asked to appear before the panel on March 6.

He said, “Twitter is also in the process of hiring a country head for India,” but declined to give a specific timeline.

Crowell said that, “ the company was going to invest both in personnel and in the platform, particularly because we have this important election coming up here.”

However, Crowell was also critical about draft rules proposed in December by the Indian Ministry.

The draft rules includes removing of content within 24 hours which deemed to be lawless and anything affects the "sovereignty and integrity of India".

"Certainly asking the technology companies to pro-actively police platforms to remove illegal content puts those platforms in a quasi-judicial role," Crowell said.

He also admitted that globally there are attempts to manipulate conversations, search and trending topics on the platform.

“That's why we've doubled down on the technologies and machine learning and our anti-spam proprietary tools to go after that content at scale on a global basis,” he said.

-Sai Kumar