Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has argued the platform should be as unrestrained as possible. Since taking the helm, he has reinstated the accounts of people like former President Donald Trump, whose account was suspended last year over posts inciting violence.

But Big Tech like Twitter is used — and perceived — differently outside the U.S., where the majority of its users live. From the genocide of ethnic Rohingya in Myanmar to attacks on Muslims in India, social media platforms have been criticized for allocating inadequate resources in the Global South to tackle hate speech, misinformation, the targeting of political dissidents and the real-life violence that often results. 

“For the longest time, South Asian countries have been ignored in terms of policy, content moderation strength and language support,” Sinha told NBC News.

Although Twitter has always been moderated through “the prism of the developed world,” he said, the danger now is that “Musk is dictating policies from his own prism: the prism of a U.S. billionaire.”

Twitter’s U.S. press team did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A WhatsApp message to a Twitter communications employee in India also went unanswered.

‘Complex political realities’

While Twitter has fewer users than Facebook, civil society groups and journalists say it is a crucial tool for holding the powerful to account. The platform has been used in multiple countries to organize anti-government protests and rally support for dissidents.

But it is also flooded with misinformation and hate speech, said Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter who worked there for more than a year writing algorithms to label and flag misinformation regarding elections, Covid and other issues in countries such as India and Brazil. She recalled feeling like she was working at an important place, and that her efforts to make Twitter a safer and less toxic platform were important too.

A contract worker based in San Francisco, she was among the thousands of Twitter employees who discovered they had been laid off this month when they were unceremoniously locked out of their email and Slack accounts. 

In the absence of sufficient staffing and resources, Ingle fears the most for Twitter’s content moderation in countries outside the U.S. 

“The workforce has been gutted and no algorithm can keep up the pace with this,” she said. “It will lead to an increase in misinformation and attacks.”

With his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Musk has also inherited a legal case that is considered a deciding moment for the freedom of online speech in India. The company sued the Indian government in July over sweeping regulatory changes that give officials greater power to demand that tech platforms remove content or block accounts that are critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Company employees can be held criminally liable if they do not comply.

Even before the new rules came into effect last year, police raided Twitter’s offices in Delhi and Gurgaon after the company tagged a BJP spokesperson’s tweet as “manipulated media.”

Twitter users have also been arrested over their posts, including a state lawmaker who was critical of Modi. Zubair, the Alt News co-founder, was arrested in June over a 2018 tweet that police said hurt religious harmony. His arrest came days after he flagged a video in which a BJP spokesperson made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. Both Zubair and the state lawmaker have since been released on bail.

From July to December 2021, India made more requests than any other country for the removal of tweets by journalists and news outlets, according to a Twitter report. The country also ranked second after the U.S. for the highest number of government information requests.