India Threatened To Shut Down Twitter, Says Jack Dorsey Responding to Dorsey's allegation, the minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, "His comments are an outright lie"
By Teena Jose
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Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has raised allegations against the Indian government saying that India had threatened to shut down the micro-blogging site if it did not comply with the government's orders to restrict accounts related to the 2020-21 farmers' protest and journalists critical of the government.
The ex-CEO raised the allegations in an interview, which the Indian government has denied, with two ministers calling it a lie. Dorsey made the allegation while detailing some of the pressures that Twitter had faced from foreign governments on his watch.
"India, for example, is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers' protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government and 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," said Dorsey.
Responding to Dorsey's allegation, the minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, said: "His comments are an outright lie. The fact is that Twitter, for a long duration between 2020 and 2022, was not complying with Indian law. During the entire period of 2020 to 2022, when they were not in compliance with Indian law, they were neither raided, they were neither sent to jail. So this is a fiction that he has put out."
"Government of India has consistently maintained that any platform — whether they are foreign or Indian… big or small, must comply with Indian laws if they are to operate in India," the minister added.
"People are now aware of what Twitter was doing during those two years. It has come out in the public domain through the Twitter Files that Twitter was misusing its power as a platform to selectively de-amplify and selectively de-platform people both in India and abroad," Chandrasekharan clarified.
