Dorsey, who will step down as Twitter’s CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India had threatened the company if it did not comply with government requests to remove posts and restrict accounts that belonged to farmers. Protesters who criticize the government will be shut down and employees will be raided. In 2020 and 2021.
“It was manifested in ways like: ‘We will shut down Twitter in India’, which is a huge market for us. ‘We will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; and this India is, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has repeatedly denied engaging in online censorship and said on Tuesday that Dorsey’s claims were an “outright lie”.
No one went to jail or Twitter was shut down. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had difficulty accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in a post on Twitter.
Farmers’ protests over agrarian reforms have continued for a year and have been the biggest challenge to Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Farmers ended protests in late 2021 after winning concessions.
“India is a country that has had a lot of requests from us around farmers’ protests, especially around journalists who were critical of the government,” Dorsey said.
The Indian government says it only aims to ban misinformation and posts that threaten peace and security.
During the protests, Modi’s government called for the “inflammatory” Twitter hashtag “#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” and the “emergency blocking” of dozens of accounts.
Twitter initially complied but later reinstated most of the accounts, citing “insufficient justification” to continue the suspension.
Dorsey cited similar pressure from the governments of Turkey and Nigeria, which had restricted the platform in their nations at various points over the years before lifting those restrictions.
