Jack Dorsey says Indian govt threatened to ban Twitter, Rajeev Chandrashekar calls it an ‘outright lie’

Twitter has been at odds with the Indian government for a long time. Whether it is over taking down misleading tweets during farmers protest or complying with the local data protection law, the micro-blogging platform has never had the smoothest sail in the country. Now, in a moment of revelation, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has highlighted just how rough it got for the company in India.

Speaking during an interview with YouTube channel Breaking Points, Dorsey claimed that the Indian government gave threats of winding down the company’s business in the country and conducting raids on employees’ homes when Twitter refused to comply with the government’s demands to block accounts during the farmers’ protests in early 2021.

“We would 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,” Dorsey said on the channel when asked to share some examples of pressure from foreign governments during his tenure.

“India is a country that had many requests 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,” Dorsey added during the interview.

What is Indian government saying?

The Indian government has strongly refuted the claims made by the Twitter founder, calling them ‘outright lies’. Reacting to Dorsey’s statement, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, in a lengthy post on Twitter said that no one went to jail nor was Twitter shut down in the country.

“This is an outright lie by @jack — perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history. Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in repeated and continuous violations of the India law,” the Union Minister wrote in a Tweet.

This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of twitters history

Facts and truth@twitter undr Dorsey n his team were in repeated n continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law… https://t.co/SlzmTcS3Fa

— Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳 (@Rajeev_GoI) June 13, 2023

“Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law…It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it,” the minister added.

Furthermore, Chandrashekhar said that there was a lot of misinformation going on social media, and consequently on Twitter during farmers’ protest in 2023 and that the government was obligated to remove the mislead posts as they could inflame the situation further. However, Twitter under Jack Dorsey had a problem in removing misleading posts from its platform in India.

“During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake…Such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under 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 USA,” he added.