India Refutes Jack Dorsey’s Allegations On Pressure During Farmers' Protests
Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, “had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law”, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekar says.
India has dismissed Jack Dorsey’s allegations that Twitter Inc. had faced government pressure and threats of a shutdown during the farmer protests in 2021 as an "outright lie".
The microblogging platform, under its co-founder and former chief executive officer, "had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law" and behaved as if the laws didn’t apply to it, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, tweeted on Tuesday. "No one went to jail nor was Twitter 'shutdown'."
Dorsey, in a video chat with Breaking Points podcast, said that during the 2021 farmer protests against the now-repealed farm laws, the Narendra Modi government had pressured Twitter to block certain accounts critical of the administration.
"India is a country that had many requests around the farmer protests, around particular journalists who were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as 'we will shut Twitter down in India', which is a very big 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'...," Dorsey said.
"And this is India, a democratic country."
Dorsey has since moved on from Twitter, selling the platform to Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk.
“@twitter under Dorsey and his team were 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 June 2022 when they finally complied,” Chandrashekar tweeted. “India, as a sovereign nation, has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India.”
During the farmer protests, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide, which were definitely fake, the union minister said. It was the government’s responsibility to ensure that the misinformation didn’t inflame the situation.
“Such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under the Jack regime that they had a problem removing misinformation from the platform in India when they did it themselves when similar events took place in the U.S.,” Chandrasekhar said. “There is ample evidence in the public domain about Jack’s Twitter’s arbitrary, blatantly partisan, and discriminatory conduct and misuse of its power on its platform during that period.”
“Twitter under Dorsey was not just violating Indian law, but was partisan in how it was using ‘deamplify’ and deplatforming some arbitrarily in violation of Articles 14 and 19 of our constitution, and also assisting in weaponising misinformation.”
Meanwhile, opposition leaders joined the debate.
"Will Modi govt answer?" Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala asked on Twitter. Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut said Dorsey's comment is evidence that freedom of speech in India is under threat and "democracy is being strangled behind the curtain".
At the peak of the farmers' protest in February 2021, the government had asked Twitter to remove 1,200 accounts that it suspected to be linked to Khalistan sympathisers or backed by Pakistan, according to a Hindu report dated Feb. 8, 2021. Additionally, the government felt that then CEO Dorsey "liking" a few tweets supporting the protest raises questions over the platform's neutrality.
