ISLAMABAD: Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed that the Indian government threatened to shut down the platform and raid employees’ homes.
Dorsey said in an interview with a US-based YouTube channel that India wanted the removal of many tweets and accounts associated with the farmers’ protest in 2020. He also claimed that Twitter was asked to suppress journalists who were critical of the government. India denied the charges, accusing Twitter of breaking the law.
On Tuesday, federal minister Rajeev Chandrashekar tweeted that this is an outright lie… Perhaps an attempt to erase that extremely shady phase of Twitter’s history. He further said that no one was arrested and that Twitter was not “shut down.” Dorsey’s Twitter regime has difficulty acknowledging Indian law’s sovereignty. He said that it behaved as of the laws of India did not apply to it.
Dorsey’s comments, made on the American news series Breaking Points, are the latest in an already troubled relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government with Twitter. It also comes at a time when Twitter has become involved in a heated discussion about its role in upholding free speech principles, with numerous countries clamouring to limit Twitter’s power. Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter in 2021, and the social media platform was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.
India and Turkey Make Requests
Dorsey said in the interview, which was posted on YouTube on Monday, that “countries such as India and Turkey made many requests to us to take down journalists’ accounts that provide tactile information and remove them from the platform. He added that he was “surprised at the level of engagement and requests” by governments of the world to censor content on the platform during his time.
During the height of farmer protests over a series of agricultural reform laws, the government asked Twitter to remove messages it believed utilized an incendiary hashtag, as well as accounts it claimed were used by Pakistan-backed Sikh separatist groups. The request came after the largely peaceful protest was shattered by violence on January 26, 2021, which killed one person and injured hundreds of policemen.
Twitter initially suspended 250 accounts, including those of a news magazine and activists and organizations linked to the year-long protests on the outskirts of Delhi. However, Twitter restored the accounts six hours later, citing “insufficient justification” for maintaining the suspension. The Indian government promptly ordered Twitter to re-block the accounts and warned the employees of the company in India that legal action – including up to seven years in prison – would be taken if they did not comply.
Twitter responded by noting that blocking accounts belonging to media companies, journalists, activists, and politicians would be a violation of their “fundamental right to free expression under Indian law.”
