Twitter co-founder claims Indian govt threatened to ‘shut down Twitter’, minister calls it a lie

Jack Dorsey interview

In an interview with YouTube channel Breaking Points, Dorsey responded to questions asked about receiving any pressure from foreign governments. Here, he said that the Indian government made many requests to censor accounts of journalists that were critical of the government during the farmer protests. The farmer protests took place in India between 2020 and 2021 during which Dorsey was serving as the CEO of Twitter. 

The Indian government also made threats to shut Twitter down in the country, and to raid the homes of its employees, as per Dorsey. “We will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit… We will raid homes of your employees, which they did,” Dorsey was quoted as saying in the interview. “And this is India, a democratic country,” he added. This did happen though in 2021 when Twitter offices were raided over the social platform labelling one BJP spokesperson’s tweet as “manipulated media”. 

Indian government refutes Dorsey’s claims

Rajeev Chandasekhar, Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship of India, refuted the claims made by Dorsey in a tweet. Chandrashekhar said that Dorsey and his team were in repeated and continuous violations of Indian law from 2020 to 2022. The company finally complied with India’s laws in June 2022. He added that Dorsey’s Twitter had a problem with India’s sovereign law. 

On the requests made to censor tweets, the minister said that these were made to stop the spread of misinformation on the platform. During the protests there were fake information spreading on Twitter and the government was “obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news.”

“There is ample evidence now in public domain abt Jacks twitter’s arbitrary, blatantly partisan n discriminatory conduct and misuse of its power on its platform during that period,” he added in the tweet. 

Dorsey is no longer the CEO of Twitter as he quit from the position last year. The position was taken over by Indian-origin Parag Agrawal. Twitter was later bought by Elon Musk after which he fired Agrawal followed by Dorsey stepping down from the company’s board of directors.