Here’s what happened when Ravi Shankar Prasad’s Twitter handle was blocked and then restored an hour later.

Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad claimed that he was denied access to his Twitter account for nearly an hour due to a “violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the United States.” He claimed that he was not notified before his account was blocked, though his access was later restored.

Friends! Something highly peculiar happened today. Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account. pic.twitter.com/WspPmor9Su

— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) June 25, 2021

Taking his complaint to the social media platform Koo, Ravi Shankar stated that Twitter’s action violates the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 because he did not notify them before denying access to the account.

After his account was restored, Ravi Shankar accused the microblogging platform in a series of tweets, saying “it is not a harbinger of free speech.”

“Twitter’s actions show that they are not the harbinger of free speech that they claim to be, but are only interested in pushing their agenda, with the threat that if you do not toe the line they draw, they will arbitrarily remove you from their platform,” he wrote.

“Twitter’s actions were in flagrant violation of Rule 4(8) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 in that they failed to provide me with any prior notice before denying me access to my account,” he said.

He warned that ‘all social media platforms will be required to comply with the new IT rules.’ “Regardless of what any platform does, they will have to fully comply with the new IT Rules, and there will be no exceptions.”