Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's claim that India threatened to "shut down offices" in the country and raided employees' homes after the platform refused to restrict accounts covering farmers' protests and those critical of the government has sparked controversy.
It was during an interview to the YouTube channel Breaking Points on Monday that Dorsey made the claim: "India for example, India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers' protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government. 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."
Dorsey, who quit his Twitter CEO role in 2021, a year before it was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022, was referring to the year-long protest organised by farmers over the now-repealed farm laws. The stir was called off in late 2021 after the Centre granted concessions regarding certain laws.
Besides India, Dorsey also mentioned pressure from governments in Turkey and Nigeria. Both the countries had restricted Twitter before lifting the bans.
"Turkey is very similar (to India), like we had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their courts and often won, but they threatened to shut us down constantly," he said. Dorsey also added that the situation in Nigeria was such that Twitter could not even put its employees on the ground in the country out of fear of what the government might do to them.
However, the Centre rubbished Dorsey's comment calling it 'outright lies'. A statement by Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said Dorsey's statement was "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 Indian law. As a matter of fact, they were in non-compliance with the law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied. No one went to jail nor was Twitter "shut down". Dorsey's Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law," the statement added.
The Union Minister added that Twitter under Dorsey had "a problem removing misinformation from the platform in India when they did it themselves when a similar event took place in the USA".
Chandrasekhar added that the government's focus was only on compliance of Indian law.