Jack Dorsey, who leveled these allegations against India said “India threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the government’s handling of farmer protests,”. However, India has refuted such a claim and has called Jack Dorsey’s claim an “outright lie”.
According to an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points, Jack, CEO of Square, said “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,”
However, Deputy Minister for Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a high-ranking official in Prime Minister Modi’s government has opposed this claims and described them as an “outright lie”
He tweeted saying “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,”.
Jack’s recent allegations about the Indian government have once more shed light on the relationship between the Indian government and foreign technology companies in India. Prime Minister Modi’s government has usually been in the habit of criticizing Google, Facebook, and Twitter for not doing enough in preventing the spread of fake or “anti-India” content on their various platforms as well as complying with their rules.
These recent comments by the former Twitter CEO have gained wide attention all over the internet as rarely is it seen that global companies which operate in India criticize the Indian government. Jack Dorsey also talked about similar pressure which Twitter had faced from both Nigerian and Turkish governments at various times when he was CEO of Twitter, in which certain bans which have now been lifted were placed on the social media platform.
Deputy Minister for Information Technology, Mr Rajeev also said that Twitter during Jack’s period as CEO continued to violate Indian laws but since June 2022, has begun to comply with those laws.
Although Prime Minister Modi and his ministers make use of Twitter a lot, complaints have risen from free speech activists that his administration has resorted to excessive censorship of certain content in the country, while India claims that this censorship or content removal is aimed at protecting users and sovereignty of the state.
For instance “#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” which trended when farmers’ groups protested against the new agriculture laws in 2021, led to a public spat between Twitter and Modi’s government, which demanded an “emergency blocking” of the “provocative” Twitter hashtag. However, the government later submitted to the farmers’ demands.
Twitter, which initially banned many of the accounts trending the hashtags then later had them restored against the government’s request citing “insufficient justification”, which later led to Indian officials threatening Twitter with legal consequences.
Jack commented on this event in the interview saying that many Indian content takedown requests during the farmers’ group protest were “around particular journalists that were critical of the government.”
India, which ranked 140th on World Press Freedom Index, has fallen to 161 in 2023, out of 180 countries, which is its lowest ranking since Prime Minister Modi came to power in 2014.
