India threatened to shut down Twitter during farmers’ protests, says Jack Dorsey.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has reaffirmed that Twitter received “many requests” from India to restrict accounts documenting farmers’ protests and criticising the government.
He has also stated that the platform has been threatened with “a shutdown” and that raids have been conducted at its employees’ residences around the country.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, replied to Dorsey’s assertions, claiming that under his leadership, Twitter engaged in “repeated and continuous violations of Indian law” and at times “weaponised misinformation.”
It is worth mentioning that Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, has previously described India’s social media laws as “strict.”
Musk stated in April of this year that he would rather comply with the government’s banning orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail.
Musk was apparently referring to India’s Information Technology Rules, 2021, which state that a top representative of a social media company, known as the chief compliance officer, can face jail time for violating the rules.
During an interview late Monday night on the YouTube channel Breaking Points, when asked about the pressures he had received from foreign governments during his time as CEO of Twitter, Dorsey said, “India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as ‘We will shut Twitter down in India,’ which is a very large market for us; ‘We will raid the homes of your employees,’ which they did; ‘We will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit,’ and this is India, a democratic country.”
The Centre has urged Twitter to remove nearly 1,200 accounts for supposed “Khalistan” links at the height of the country’s farmers’ protest in 2021.
Previously, it had requested that more than 250 accounts be removed from the platform.
Twitter replied by blocking some of the accounts but later unblocking them, which irritated the IT ministry.
Later in its response, Twitter refused to block these accounts, claiming free speech on its platform.
The response, however, did not sit well with the government, which stated that the platform could not “assume the role of a court and justify noncompliance.”
In May 2021, days after Twitter flagged some posts by ruling party leaders alleging a Congress plot to malign the Prime Minister and the Central Government as “manipulated media,” a team of Delhi Police’s Special Cell—working under the Union Home Ministry—knocked on the doors of Twitter India’s Delhi and Gurgaon offices to ostensibly serve the social media platform a notice.
India threatened to shut down Twitter during farmers’ protests, claims ex-CEO Twitter Jack Dorsey.
This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of twitters history
Facts and truth@twitter undr Dorsey n his team were in repeated n continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law… https://t.co/SlzmTcS3Fa
— Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳 (@Rajeev_GoI) June 13, 2023
Reacting to Dorsey’s claims, Chandrasekhar said that no one from Twitter went to jail nor was the platform “shut down,” despite the fact that they were in “non-compliance with the law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only in June 2022 when they finally complied.”
“Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it,” Chandrasekhar said.
“India, as a sovereign nation, has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India.”
Also read: Twitter to start paying verified content creators in few weeks
He added that the Centre was “obligated” to issue takedown orders during the farmers’ protest in 2021 since there was “a lot of misinformation and reports of genocide that were definitely fake.”
“Such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under Jack’s regime that they had a problem removing misinformation from the platform in India when they did it themselves when similar events took place in the USA,” he said.
