The Congress on Tuesday said that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s assertion about the Narendra Modi government threatening to shut the company’s operations in India if it didn’t fall in line had exposed the real face of the “darpok tanashah” (cowardly autocrat) who habitually intimidated the mainstream media and social media platforms.
“No matter how viciously you try to suppress the truth, it comes out,” Congress social media head Supriya Shrinate said at a news conference.
“The darpok tanashah tried to suppress the agitating farmers and whichever media (outlet) dared to show their protest. The question here is, why is the Prime Minister such a coward? Why is he so afraid of the truth?”
Dorsey’s claim buttresses the Congress charge that the Modi government manipulates social media platforms to influence public opinion.
On Tuesday, the party asked the government to stop intimidating the media and other platforms of communication as that affects democracy.
During an interview with a YouTube channel, Breaking Points, Dorsey had been asked about the pressures he faced from foreign governments when he was Twitter CEO.
He replied: “India, for example, is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers’ protests, 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.”
Responding to the government’s denial of Dorsey’s allegation, Shrinate said: “There is no other defence other than saying that Dorsey is lying. What does he have to gain through lying or not lying or telling the truth, but the government has a lot to gain through lying.
“If you remember, in May 2021, when the farmers’ agitation was at its peak, the BJP fake news factory and multiple leaders had tweeted about an alleged toolkit, which was tagged as ‘manipulated media’ by Twitter. Twitter was then raided on May 24, 2021.
“It happened because the idea was to suppress the farmers’ agitation. The idea was to send out a message that anybody standing with the farmers or showing their movement would be suppressed like this.”
Shrinate recalled how Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter handle was blocked in August 2021 and a shadow ban was imposed limiting the growth in the number of his followers. This was undone, she said, only after The Wall Street Journal wrote to Twitter in February 2022 that it was going to do a story on this.
Shrinate added: “Why should I not say today that this happened at the behest of the Modi government? They later hatched a conspiracy to oust him from Parliament. But this manipulation of social media platforms, or the media at large, is what ails Indian democracy.
“The mother of democracy is seeing a murder of democracy in broad daylight and people are being coaxed into submission, and that is what the weakening of democracy is.”