‘Outright lie’: Govt rejects ex-Twitter CEO Dorsey's ‘shut down’, ‘raid’ claims
Dorsey alleged that Twitter was threatened with shut downs in India, Nigeria and Turkey unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts.
Union minister Rajeev Chandrashekar on Tuesday rejected Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's claim that the Indian government put pressure on the social media company to block accounts covering farmers' protest, calling it an “outright lie” and “an attempt to brush out that very dubious period” of firm's history.
In a YouTube Show ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’, the former Twitter boss alleged that the Indian government threatened to shut down the social media platform in India and raid the houses of staff.
When asked if he had faced any pressure from foreign governments, Dorsey, who stepped down from Twitter's board last year, replied, “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.”
Responding to the serious allegations, Chandrashekar said Twitter under Jack Dorsey repeatedly violated Indian law between 2020-22 and complied only in June 2022, weeks after billionaire investor Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of the social media giant. He alleged that Twitter had a problem accepting the “sovereignty of India law” and behaved “as if the laws of India did not apply to it.”
"No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shutdown’…India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India,” the Union minister of state for Electronics and Technology said in a tweet.
There was a lot of misinformation and fake reports of genocide doing rounds on Twitter during the farmers' protest in 2021, the minister said, and the Indian government was “obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news.”
Chandrashekhar pointed to Twitter's action prompt action in removing misinformation during the US Capitol attack in January 2020 but they had a “problem removing misinformation from the platform in India,” alleging partisan behaviour of the America-based company under Jack Dorsey.
“To set the record straight, no one was raided or sent to jail. Our focus was only on ensuring the compliance of Indian laws,” he asserted.
To be sure, Delhi Police officers visited Twitter offices in South Delhi’s Lado Sarai and Golf Course Road in Gurugram in May 2021 in connection with a tweet by Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) national spokesperson Sambit Patra about an alleged toolkit released by the Congress party that the microblogging site tagged as “manipulated media.” A police team from Lodhi Colony’s special cell visited the offices to secure the participation of Twitter’s managing director Manish Maheshwari as part of the probe.
