Former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey said that the Indian government made several requests to Twitter for taking down tweets relating to the farmers’ protests, and of those journalists critical of the Centre. This, he alleged, was followed up by exerting pressure and threatening to raid Twitter employees.
Dismissing the accusations, the Indian government has labelled Dorsey's comments as an "outright lie". Dorsey made these remarks on Monday, in an interview with the YouTube channel Breaking Points. During the interview, the former CEO was asked about the pressures he had received from foreign governments during his time as CEO of Twitter.
What remarks did Dorsey make?
Dorsey, who quit his position as CEO of Twitter in 2021, claimed on Monday that India had threatened to shut down the microblogging platform in the country and conduct raids on employees if it refused to conform to government orders to delete tweets and block accounts that were critical of the government in response to farmer protests in 2020 and 2021.
"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; And this is India, a democratic country," Dorsey said in the interview.
Dorsey's remarks came as he was asked to provide examples of foreign government pressure so that the audience could understand how it felt when some of the world's "most powerful people" approached him and demanded things from the company.
Dorsey also cited comparable pressure from governments in Turkey and Nigeria, both of which have restricted the platform in their respective countries at various periods throughout the years before lifting such bans.
Prompted by the three controversial laws, farmer protests had started in November 2020 by thousands of farmers who had been camping at Delhi border points. After the year-long protest, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in November 2021, repealed the three contentious farm laws, acknowledging the failure to convince the farmers.
As the protests started peaking, the Indian government sought an "emergency blocking" of the "provocative" Twitter hashtag "#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide" and dozens of accounts during the protests. Twitter first obliged, but then reinstated the majority of the suspended accounts, citing "insufficient justification" to keep the suspensions in place, Reuters reported.
How has the government reacted to Dorsey's remarks?
The government has vehemently denied the allegations made by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey about receiving "many requests" from India to censor accounts. In a tweet, Union IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar reacted to the comments as an "outright lie by Jack Dorsey, perhaps an attempt to brush out a dubious period of Twitter's history".
In a long tweet, Chandasekhar hit back at Jack Dorsey, saying on his watch, Twitter was in "repeated and continuous violation of Indian law" and that the "Dorsey Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law".
"As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied. No one went to jail nor was Twitter 'shutdown' (sic)," he wrote. The government, he asserted, "was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news".
The IT Minister also said that there was "ample evidence" in the public domain about "Jacks twitter's arbitrary, blatantly partisan and discriminatory conduct and misuse of its power on its platform" during that period.
Chandrasekhar concluded his long tweet by saying, "Our government's policies remain clear for all Intermediaries operating in India - compliance with laws to ensure Internet is Safe and Trusted, Accountable."
India's trend of online censorship
According to the Twitter transparency report published in April, India was listed among the top countries that requested to remove content from Twitter between January 2022 and June 2022.
The Twitter transparency report shared data from January 2022 to July 2022, according to which Twitter received over 16,000 government information requests for user data from over 85 countries during the reporting period. "The top five requesting countries seeking account information in H1 2022 were India, the United States, France, Japan, and Germany," the report added.
According to the report, from July 2021 to December 2021, India was also one of the top requester of content removal from Twitter. The social media platform had received 2,211 requests for 7,768 accounts in India.
The numbers mentioned above, represent almost a fifth of the global total in those months.