India has threatened to shut down Twitter unless it complies with orders to restrict accounts criticizing the government’s handling of the farmer protests, co-founder Jack Dorsey has said, an accusation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government called an «absolute lie.» «.
Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India also threatened the company with employee raids if it did not comply with government requests to remove certain posts.
“It came out in ways such as: ‘We will shut down Twitter in India,’ which is a very big market for us; ‘we will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; And this is India, a democratic country,» Dorsey said in an interview with the YouTube news show Breaking Points.
Information Technology Deputy Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a high-ranking official in the Modi government, lashed out at Dorsey in response, calling his claims an «absolute lie».
“No one went to jail and Twitter was not ‘shut down.’ The Dorsey Twitter regime had trouble accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” she said in a post on Twitter.
Dorsey’s comments again highlighted the struggles facing foreign tech giants operating under the Modi government. His government has often criticized Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle false or «anti-India» content on their platforms, or for not abiding by the rules.
The comments by the former Twitter chief executive drew widespread attention as it is rare for global companies operating in India to publicly criticize the government. Last year, Xiaomi in a court filing said India’s financial crime agency threatened its executives with «physical violence» and coercion, a charge the agency denied.
Dorsey also cited similar pressure from the governments of Turkey and Nigeria, which had restricted the platform in their countries at different points over the years before lifting those bans.
Twitter was bought by Elon Musk in a $44 billion deal last year.
Chandrasekhar said that Twitter under Dorsey and his team had repeatedly violated Indian law. He did not name Musk, but added that Twitter had been in compliance since June 2022.
Modi and his ministers are prolific users of Twitter, but free speech activists say his administration resorts to excessive censorship of content it considers critical to its operation. India maintains that its content removal orders are aimed at protecting users and the sovereignty of the state.
The public spat with Twitter during 2021 saw the Modi government seeking an «emergency block» of the «provocative» Twitter hashtag «#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide» and dozens of accounts. Farmer groups had been protesting against the new farm laws at the time, one of the biggest challenges facing the Modi government.
Subsequently, the government gave in to the farmers’ demands.
Twitter initially complied with the government’s requests, but later restored most of the accounts, citing «insufficient cause,» prompting officials to threaten legal consequences.
In the weeks that followed, police visited a Twitter office as part of another investigation related to the labeling of some ruling party posts as manipulated. Twitter at the time said it was concerned about the safety of the staff.
Dorsey in his interview said that many requests to remove content from India during the farmers’ protests were «revolving around individual journalists who were critical of the government.»
Since Modi took office in 2014, India has risen from 140th in the World Press Freedom Index to 161st this year, out of 180 countries, its lowest ranking to date.