The Indian government has responded after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey made sensational claims saying the social media platform received threats of being booted out of the country after not accepting the request to block certain accounts at the peak of the farmers’ protests.
Union Minister of State for Electronics & Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar took to Twitter to post a rebuttal where he said Dorsey was attempting to “brush out a very dubious period of Twitter’s history”.
“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.
The minister added that the government was attempting to remove misinformation traversing the social media platform.
“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.
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
During the interview, Dorsey was asked how did the platform manage when powerful people came to them and demanded certain actions and if he faced any pressure from foreign governments.
“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.
“BJP is the killer of democracy, it is being proved again and again. This is Jack Dorsey, former CEO of #Twitter Here he is saying “During farmer protest Indian govt pressurised us and said we will shut down Twitter, raid the homes of your employees if you don’t follow the suite”,” said Neeraj Kundan, national president of the NSUI.
Turkey and Nigeria behaved in similar manner
Dorsey, who left Twitter last year after billionaire Elon Musk took over the company added that Turley 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.
Notably, it was under Dorsey’s rule that Twitter briefly lost its ‘intermediary’ status in India after refusing to comply with the country’s new IT rules. The US-based company, at the time, failed to employ a grievance officer, despite being granted repeated extensions.
(With inputs from agencies)
