The war of words between Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government continues. In a fresh salvo, Mr Dorsey has alleged in an interview that India, among other nations, had threatened a range of intimidatory actions, including the shutting down of the micro-blogging site and raids on homes of its employees, if Twitter did not comply with New Delhi’s request to restrict the accounts of users critical of the regime during the farmers’ protests. The Centre has, expectedly, denied the charge, with two of its ministers describing Mr Dorsey’s allegations as a fabrication. It must be noted, though, that Twitter’s offices in Delhi and Gurgaon had been ‘visited’ by the police after it had flagged some tweets by functionaries of the BJP. The government denies that this was a raid: perhaps that could be because visitations from the police or, say, from tax authorities to alleged dissenters are par for the course in Narendra Modi’s mother of democracy.
But this slugfest must not deflect attention from the larger fact that neither Mr Modi’s government nor Twitter has been a reliable advocate of free speech. The latter, for instance, has been hauled up for its allegedly discriminatory attitude towards political conservatives under Mr Dorsey’s watch. In Elon Musk’s hands, there is concern that Twitter is pandering to propaganda by China, Russia and Iran. On the other hand, the BJP’s hawkish attitude stands exposed not only by the voluminous requests its government reportedly sent to Twitter to block content but also, most tellingly, in the framing — weaponising — of legislations that can be used to target social media intermediaries. As polarisation deepens across polities, complemented by the explosion of social media platforms as effective tools of amplifying opinion and information, opinionated Big Tech and the State can be expected to collide repeatedly. The truth is that neither is innocent when it comes to upholding the democratic norm of a free exchange of views.
