India, according to Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, 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 government has denied Dorsey’s allegation — made in an interview with the “anti-establishment” YouTube show Breaking Points — 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. Among the first examples he cited was India, besides Turkey and Nigeria.
“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.”
Reacting 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.”
He added: “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….”
Chandrasekhar brought up the Twitter Files — select internal documents of Twitter Inc that current CEO Elon Musk has released to the US media — which show how the company had handled requests for blacklisting.
“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,” Chandrasekhar said.
Information and broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur sought to link Dorsey’s allegation to a conspiracy to defame India ahead of elections.
“India is the largest and most transparent democracy in the world. Whenever elections are near in India, some foreign powers and their agents here are active in a planned way to destabilise and defame the country,” Thakur said.
“Jack Dorsey is telling a white lie. Why hasn’t he responded till today on the revelations in Twitter Files about his bias?”
Dorsey, however, did talk about the Twitter Files in the interview. He said the documents should have been released in full so that readers got to know the context, which was now missing because of the selective release.
Police had visited Twitter’s offices in Delhi and Gurgaon in May 2021 after the micro-blogging site flagged some tweets by BJP functionaries as “manipulated media”, although this was not called a “raid” officially.
A month later, the Delhi police went to Bangalore to question Twitter’s India head, Manish Maheshwari.
Dorsey’s allegation appears to relate specifically to Twitter’s face-off with the government in February 2021. After the violence on Republic Day that year during the farmers’ tractor rally, Twitter had announced in early February that 500 accounts had been permanently suspended and access to some content on several other handles blocked in accordance with directives from the electronics and IT ministry.
At the same time, Twitter resisted a directive to take similar action against news media entities, journalists, activists and politicians.
The government, predictably, was not too pleased with Twitter’s later decision to unilaterally unblock more than 250 accounts that had been suspended briefly.
While Twitter had started off as the go-to platform for the BJP and its support base, the growth of a counter-narrative on the site led to a souring of relations, with the Right wing alleging bias and moving to the indigenous microblogging service, Koo.
Matters came to a head with Dorsey in 2018. On an India visit — during which he also called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi — Dorsey got photographed holding a placard with "Smash Brahminical Patriarchy" scrawled on it.
The backlash that followed put Dorsey at the centre of the war of words that takes place on Twitter in India every day.
The following year, the parliamentary standing committee on information technology – then headed by Thakur — summoned Dorsey, purportedly to hear his views on “safeguarding citizens’ rights on social/ online news media platforms”.
But the summons were also viewed as an attempt to quiz him on the allegations of a bias against Right-wing handles on his platform.
Dorsey did not respond to the summons, citing the recent visit in 2018 and the short notice. An FIR had been filed against him in India for allegedly defaming Brahmins.
