Musk’s Twitter Reinstates Hindu Nationalist Accounts That Disparage Muslims

The tweets include a debunked video that the person who posted it claimed showed a Muslim cleric spitting on rice before serving it to others, another calling Pakistani Muslims “rectums,” and a retweet of a user who called the Quran “the source of all evil.”

The Hindu-majority South Asian nation has deep social and religious divisions that have in the past erupted into fatal religious confrontations, sometimes connected to material spread online. Muslims make up about 14% of India’s population.

Twitter had 41 million users in India as of December, making it the company’s third-biggest market by users after the U.S. and Japan, according to eMarketer, a unit of data and research firm Insider Intelligence.

Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has said Twitter should be more cautious about removing tweets or banning users. Widespread layoffs, as well as mass resignations after Mr. Musk demanded that employees commit to his “extremely hardcore” vision for the workplace, have led to a wave of departures among policy and safety-issue employees around the globe.

Mr. Musk in November said he would reinstate suspended accounts, bringing back users who had been deemed in violation of policies against hate speech, inciting violence or engaging in other barred behavior.

He said the amnesty would pertain to accounts that haven’t “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”

Among the Twitter accounts reinstated were well-known accounts from the West, such as those of former President

Donald Trump

and comedian Kathy Griffin.

Twitter last week blocked more than 50 tweets containing the first episode of a BBC documentary that examined Prime Minister

Narendra Modi

‘s leadership during deadly 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat when he was chief minister of the state, according to the Indian government.

Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser to India’s ministry of information and broadcasting, said on Twitter Saturday that the government had used emergency powers to order Twitter and Google’s YouTube, where several videos also appeared, to block the episode. Mr. Gupta called the documentary propaganda.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. A YouTube spokeswoman said the videos were blocked due to a copyright claim by the BBC. The BBC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Human-rights groups say they are alarmed that Mr. Musk has in recent months interacted on Twitter with accounts they say espouse views of Hindu supremacy.

Mr. Musk in November responded with a laughing emoji to one user’s tweet criticizing “leftists.” The same user has in the past tweeted support of the theory that Muslim men in India trick Hindu women into marriage to force them to convert to Islam.

In a December tweet, Mr. Musk said that he would investigate a prominent Hindu nationalist’s claim that Twitter had been secretly suppressing her postings.

Twitter on Tuesday reinstated the account of Kangana Ranaut, a well-known Bollywood actress with 2.9 million followers who has made controversial statements about religion in the past. The company in 2021 suspended her account, citing its hateful conduct and abusive behavior policy.

“Hello everyone, it’s nice to be back here,” Ms. Ranaut wrote on Twitter. A representative for Ms. Ranaut didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Twitter users in India, including members of the media, startup founders and more, have congratulated account holders who returned to the platform.

Some of the reinstated Hindu nationalist accounts “continue to post the kind of content for which they were suspended in the first place,” said Teesta Setalvad, of the rights group Citizens for Justice and Peace. “While such accounts continue to exist, there can be no control over the spread of misinformation,” she said.

Among those reinstated this month is an account with the handle Kreately.in, which has more than 144,000 followers. Twitter suspended the account in November after Ms. Setalvad’s group said it reported the owner for posting anti-Muslim content. Twitter’s rules bar the harassment of people based on characteristics such as religion.

Upon its return, the account tweeted a message praising a Hindu god. It has since then posted a torrent of tweets criticizing Muslims, including the debunked video of the Muslim cleric.

The account’s owner, who is anonymous, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Another account that has been reinstated belongs to Radharamn Das, a spokesman for a temple in the city of Kolkata that is part of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, also known as the Hare Krishna movement

“Thank you @elonmusk,” Mr. Das this month wrote to his more than 44,000 followers upon being reinstated. He said his account was suspended in November, but he didn’t say why.

In recent days Mr. Das has retweeted material calling Pakistani Muslims “rectums” and a user commenting on a video of a Belgian politician calling the Quran a “license to kill.”

Mr. Das didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“I have seen a quite significant spike in anti-minority content and posts shared on Twitter since Musk’s takeover” in October, said Raqib Hameed Naik of the research group Hindutva Watch, which monitors attacks against religious minorities by pro-Hindu groups in India.

Twitter’s user base across several Asia-Pacific countries is projected to decline for the first time this year, but is likely to fall more in India than anywhere else in the region, according to eMarketer. It will likely drop about 5% in India this year, with the proliferation of divisive content a major factor and the potential for advertisers to be spooked by the material, said Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.

“Twitter can’t afford a high-profile mistake in one of its biggest user markets,” she said.

—Alexa Corse, Rajesh Roy and Vibhuti Agarwal contributed to this article.

Write to Newley Purnell at [email protected]