south asia

Social media platform X’s policy head of India and South Asia Samiran Gupta has tendered his resignation, according to a Reuters report. 

Gupta’s resignation comes at a time when the country is heading into elections. X is also facing legal issues with the Indian government regarding content removal.

Gupta served at the highest position for X, previously known as Twitter, he was appointed to overseeing “critical content-related policy matters” and “advocating for Twitter’s stance in response to evolving policies while supporting the local sales team,” as stated on his LinkedIn profile.

According to the profile, his tenure at X concluded in September. His profile indicates that he facilitated the transition in leadership for Twitter following the acquisition by Elon Musk’s X Corp. Gupta had joined the company in February 2022, just eight months prior to Musk’s USD 44 billion takeover of Twitter.

X considers India as a crucial market and has approximately 27 million users in the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and various government officials are frequent users of the platform. 

According to the report, there are approximately 15 employees at X whose roles are related to compliance and engineering in India. However, Gupta was the sole executive responsible for liaising with the government and political parties.

X is currently appealing an Indian court’s ruling in an international court, which stated that the company had not adequately adhered to government directives to remove specific content.

The social media company argues that this ruling could potentially empower New Delhi to further restrict content and expand the boundaries of censorship

In September, India informed it stop court that X is a platform that habitually fails to comply with directives, consistently disregarding numerous orders to remove content.