Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey claimed that India threatened to shut down Twitter if it didn’t comply with orders to block accounts that were critical of how farmer demonstrations were handled; the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi labelled this claim an “outright lie.”
Dorsey, who left his position as CEO of Twitter in 2021, claimed on Monday that India had also threatened the firm with staff raids if it did not remove certain postings at the request of the government.
In an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points, Jack Dorsey stated, “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; And this is India, a democratic country.”
In response, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Indian deputy minister for information technology and a high-ranking member of Modi’s administration, attacked Dorsey and labelled his claims an “outright lie.”
“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a Twitter post.
Dorsey’s remarks once more brought attention to the challenges that international technology behemoths have been facing in India under Modi’s government. His government has frequently criticised Google, Facebook, and Twitter for failing to take action against phoney or “anti-India” content on their platforms or for breaking the law.
The former Twitter CEO’s remarks received a lot of attention because it is uncommon for foreign businesses with operations in India to openly oppose the government. Xiaomi claimed in a court document last year that India’s financial crime agency had threatened its officials with “physical violence” and coercion; the agency refuted this claim.
Top Indian officials criticised Dorsey’s comments and how Twitter has previously handled false information. However, a number of opposition politicians charged that throughout the 2020–2021 protest, the administration had silenced the views of farmers, one of the biggest opposition to Modi government.
Dorsey also referenced similar control coming from the governments of Nigeria and Turkey, which had previously imposed restrictions on the platform at various points over the years before easing such restrictions.
According to Chandrasekhar, Dorsey and his staff at Twitter frequently broke Indian law. Musk was not specifically mentioned, but he said that Twitter had been compliant since June 2022.
