India’s government has requested social media platforms to remove any content that contains or makes reference to the term “Indian variant” of Covid-19.
Hindustan Times reports that the instruction by the government was passed on to the platforms by the Ministry of Information Technology on Friday.
The IT ministry laid emphasis on the fact that the World Health Organization listed the variant presently prevalent in the country as B.1.617, and dubbing it as the “Indian variant” was false and misleading.
The Indian government had also last month ordered Facebook and Twitter to remove posts that were critical of the country’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and the administration’s response to the pandemic.
Twitter in response withheld access to the said posts in India only. They were however accessible to other regions as they were not in violation of Twitter rules.
The country which is currently battling the second wave of Covid-19 was hit hard by a new, highly contagious variant of the virus since late March.
As of May, India holds the second-highest overall number of infections after the US with more than 26 million people infected. The death toll from the virus has also neared the 300,000 mark in the country.