Twitter boss Elon Musk after meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the New York Palace Hotel in New York City on Tuesday commented on the recent statements made by his predecessor Jack Dorsey. The former Twitter CEO recently claimed that the social media platform received threats of being booted out of India after not accepting the request to block certain accounts at the peak of the farmers’ protest by the government.
“Twitter doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments. If we don’t obey local government laws then we will get shut down,” Musk told the reporters.
“The best we can do is to follow the laws in any given country,” the billionaire said, adding that it is impossible for “us to do more than that”.
“We will do the best to revive the freest speech possible under the law,” he concluded.
WATCH | PM Modi’s US visit: ‘I am a fan of Modi’, says Elon Musk after meeting PM in New York
What did Dorsey say?
“India for example, India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’… ‘we would 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,” said Dorsey.
Dorsey, who left Twitter last year after Musk took over the company added that Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behaved in a similar way to India. Ankara reportedly threatened to shut down Twitter and later got embroiled in a legal battle with the microblogging platform.
“Turkey is very similar (to India), like we had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their courts and often won, but they threatened to shut us down constantly,” said Dorsey.
He added that Twitter could not put its employees on the ground in Nigeria, out of fear what the government might do to them.
“Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in repeated and continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied,” said Chandrasekhar.
“During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake. GoI was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news,” he added.
The farmers’ protests started after the Modi government brought three controversial farm laws. Thousands of farmers from across the country camped in and around the capital city of Delhi for nearly a year, forcing the government to repeal the laws in November 2021.
(With inputs from agencies)
