Jack Dorsey accuses India of Twitter shutdown threats

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, has accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on Monday of threatening to shut down Twitter in the country unless it restricted accounts critical of handling farmer protests.

India had threatened the social media platform with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down some posts, Dorsey, who quit as Twitter’s CEO in 2021, said.

“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; and this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey added.

“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” said the Deputy Minister of Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, in a tweet, calling Dorsey’s accusations outright lies.

Dorsey and his team had repeatedly violated Indian law, Chandrasekhar added, without mentioning Elon Musk, the current Twitter CEO, saying that Twitter has been in compliance since June 2022.

Dorsey’s allegations have been highlighting the struggles faced by foreign technology companies operating under Modi’s rule, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Modi’s government has criticised the three companies for not doing enough to tackle fake, or anti-India content on their platforms, and for not complying with the country’s rules.

Dorsey also mentioned similar incidents with governments in Turkey and Nigeria, which had restricted the platform in the countries, before lifting those bans.

In a court filing, Xiaomi said that India’s financial crime agency threatened its executives with physical violence and coercion.

Opposition lawmakers have accused the government of silencing the voices of farmers during the 2020 and 2021 protests, until the government gave in to the protestors and nullified laws that were anti-farmer.