Twitter introduces Tamil Topics, adds second Indian language to feature

The new addition will allow Tamil language users to follow topics of interest such as a film personality, sports club or any area of study like vaccination research on the platform.

Twitter introduced Topics in November 2019, allowing users to follow specific topic-based tweets. A year later, the company introduced the feature in India, where, as of January this year, it had 23.6 million total users.

India is Twitter’s third largest market by user base, behind the US and Japan. However, the company continues to have a significantly smaller user base in comparison to the likes of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as homegrown social media platforms such as ShareChat – which as of May 2022 had 180 million monthly active users.

Over the past years, Twitter has claimed that the platform hosts an increasing volume of tweets in India in local languages. In 2019, ex-Twitter India managing director, Manish Maheshwari, said in an interview that over 50% of all tweets made by Indian users were in local languages, as the company attempted to build a greater user base in the country.

However, the platform was caught in a face-off with the Indian government since the introduction of the Information Technology (IT) Rules, 2021. While the initial conflict was regarding the appointment of nodal contact and grievance officers to comply with the newly instated rules, issues have escalated to censorship of content and sharing of information with the central government.

On 6 July, Twitter moved the Karnataka High Court alleging misuse of powers by government officials demanding the takedown of content. The court filing came in response to a letter served to the company by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in June, which urged Twitter to comply with its content takedown orders – or subsequently lose the safe harbour protection accorded to it under the laws of the land.

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