San Francisco, NFAPost: Twitter’s cofounder and former ceo Jack Dorsey has reiterated that the platform received “many requests” from the Indian government to block accounts covering farmers’ protests and those critical of the government.
He has also said that the platform was threatened with “a shut down” and conducting raids at its employees’ homes in the country.
Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded to Dorsey’s claims, saying that under him, Twitter was in “repeated and continuous violations of India law” and at times “weaponised misinformation”.
During an interview late Monday night to YouTube channel Breaking Points, when asked about the pressures he had received from foreign governments during his time as CEO of Twitter, Dorsey said, “India is a country that had many request 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 claims, Chandrasekhar said that no one from Twitter went to jail nor was the platform “shutdown” despite the fact that they were in “non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only in June 2022 when they finally complied”.
