In a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi led government, Twitter’s co-founder and former boss Jack Dorsey has said that the micro-blogging site received “many requests” from the Indian government to block accounts covering farmers’ protests and those critical of the government.
He has also said that Twitter was threatened with “a shut down” and conducting raids at its employees’ homes in the country.
Reacting to Dorsey’s claim, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, Twitter was in “repeated and continuous violations of India law” and at times “weaponised misinformation”.
Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk also has a similar view of India’s social media regulations, having previously called them “strict”.
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In April this year, Musk had said that he would rather comply with the government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail.
Elon Musk was possibly referring to India’s Information Technology Rules, 2021, under which a senior representative of social media companies – called the chief compliance officer – can be potentially jailed for violating the norms.
Dorsey also said: “India is a country that had many request 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”.
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During farmers’ protest in the country in 2021, the Centre had asked Twitter to take down nearly 1,200 accounts for alleged “Khalistan” links. Before that, it had asked the platform to take down more than 250 accounts.
Twitter had responded by blocking some of the accounts but subsequently unblocked them, which had irked the IT ministry.
Later in its reply, Twitter had refused to block these accounts further citing freedom of speech on its platform.
MoS IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar reacting to Dorsey’s claims, said that no one from Twitter went to jail nor was the platform “shutdown” despite the fact that they were in “non-compliance with 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.”
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 which 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.
