India’s government on Tuesday rejected an accusation by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey that it threatened to shut down the microblogging platform’s operations in the past, with a minister calling the claims an “outright lie.”
Dorsey on Monday had accused the Indian authorities of applying heavy pressure, during an interview with a YouTube program. Although Dorsey is no longer at Twitter, which was sold to Elon Musk for $44 billion last year, the spat casts a fresh spotlight on New Delhi’s complicated relationship with the company and social media in general.
In his comments to the program Breaking Points, Dorsey said Twitter had faced “many requests” to deal with accounts questioning the government’s handling of protests in 2021 — when thousands of farmers camped out near the Indian capital to oppose three agricultural liberalization laws brought in by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration. The laws were ultimately scrapped.
Asked about what kind of pressures Twitter experienced, Dorsey said many of the requests centered on critical journalists. “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,” he added.
On Tuesday, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, responded on Twitter itself.
He wrote that the platform under Dorsey and his team had been in “repeated [and] continuous violations” of Indian law. “As a matter of fact, they were in non-compliance with [the] law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022, and it was only [in] June 2022 when they finally complied.”
Nevertheless, he stressed, “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down.'”
India in 2021 imposed new rules on social networks, including a requirement to address requests for taking down violent, misleading or other objectionable content.
Speaking to reporters later on Tuesday, Chandrasekhar said the facts were “very different” from the “fiction that [Dorsey] has put out there for whatever reasons.”
Chandrasekhar said that during the protests “there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake,” arguing that Twitter was obligated to remove such content. He stressed that the Indian government has consistently maintained that any platform, whether foreign or Indian, whether big or small, must comply with Indian laws if they are to operate in the country and offer services and products to citizens.
“I am deeply disappointed by Jack Dorsey’s attempt at lying about what happened, because certainly whatever he has said in yesterday’s statement is untrue and false,” Chandrasekhar said.
