The Indian government fired back at Twitter Inc.’s former chief executive officer after he said authorities had threatened to shut down the service in the country or raid the homes of its staff unless Twitter removed certain politically-sensitive posts.
“This is an outright lie,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for Electronics and Information Technology, said in a post on Twitter. He added “no one went to jail, nor was Twitter shutdown.”
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the social media giant who quit as CEO in 2021, said in an interview with the YouTube news channel Breaking Points that authorities threatened to shut down Twitter if it didn’t comply with demands to block accounts critical of the government’s handling of farmer protests.
“And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said, in a wide-ranging discussion about the political pressures at the company, now owned by Elon Musk.
The San Francisco-based company fought back against government requests to remove sensitive posts about farmer protests, arguing that such actions would violate the “open and free exchange of information.” Ultimately, the company reversed course and agreed to suspend more than 500 accounts and block access to hundreds more in India in 2021.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration did implement severe restrictions on Twitter and other social media companies over what content could be showed in the country. India’s penalties for failing to comply with government orders for removal include potential jail terms.
Chandrasekhar accused Twitter of violating Indian laws until June 2022 and “misusing its power as a platform to selectively de-amplify and de-platform people both in India and abroad,” he told reporters.
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Early this year, Modi’s administration raided the BBC’s office in New Delhi and Mumbai weeks after the British broadcaster aired a documentary about the 2002 Gujarat riots and Modi’s alleged role in the violence in his home state.
