India threatened to shut down Twitter, says ex-CEO Jack Dorsey; govt says ‘outright lie’

It is worth noting that Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk also has a similar view of India’s social media regulations, having previously called them “strict”. In April this year, Musk had said that he would rather comply with the government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail.

Musk was possibly referring to India’s Information Technology Rules, 2021, under which a senior representative of social media companies – called the chief compliance officer – can be potentially jailed for violating the norms.

‘We will shut you down if you don’t follow suit’

During an interview late Monday night to YouTube channel Breaking Points, when asked about the pressures he had received from foreign governments during his time as CEO of Twitter, Dorsey said, “India is a country that had many request of us around the farmers protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government, and 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”.

At the height of the farmers’ protest in the country in 2021, the Centre had asked Twitter to take down nearly 1,200 accounts for alleged “Khalistan” links. Before that, it had asked the platform to take down more than 250 accounts.

Twitter had responded by blocking some of the accounts but subsequently unblocked them, which had irked the IT ministry. Later in its reply, Twitter had refused to block these accounts further citing freedom of speech on its platform. The reply, however, had not gone down well with the Government, which had said that the platform could not possibly “assume the role of a court and justify non-compliance”.

In May 2021, days after Twitter flagged some posts by ruling party leaders alleging a Congress plot to malign the Prime Minister and the Central Government as “manipulated media”, a team of Delhi Police’s Special Cell — working under the Union Home Ministry — knocked on the doors of Twitter India’s Delhi and Gurgaon offices to ostensibly serve the social media platform a notice.

‘Outright lie’ by Dorsey: MoS IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Reacting to Dorsey’s claims, Chandrasekhar said that no one from Twitter went to jail nor was the platform “shutdown” despite the fact that they were in “non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only in June 2022 when they finally complied”.

“Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it,” Chandrasekhar said. “India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India.”

He added that the Centre was “obligated” to issue takedown orders during the farmers’ protest in 2021 since there was “a lot of misinformation and reports of genocide which were definitely fake”.

“Such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under Jack’s regime, that they had a problem removing misinformation from the platform in India, when they did it themselves when similar events took place in the USA,” he said.

Growing trend of online censorship

There has been a significant surge in legal demands being made by India — from various courts and the government — to remove content from Twitter between 2014 and 2020, an analysis of Twitter’s global transparency reports by The Indian Express had earlier shown. Incidentally, in the same time period, the number of content blocking orders issued to social media companies by the government has also increased by almost 2,000 per cent, data shared with Parliament showed, highlighting the growing trend of online censorship in India.

In the first six months of 2021, Twitter was asked by various Indian courts and the government to block a little more than 4,900 tweets — this coincided with the company blocking more than 250 accounts in relation to sharing “provocative” tweets over the then ongoing farmers’ protests and the company receiving orders from the government to take down some tweets critical of the government’s handling of Covid-19.

Twitter suing the Centre

In July 2022, Twitter initiated legal action against some of the government missives ordering it to take down certain content posted on the microblogging site. Alleging disproportionate use of power by officials, the social media company moved the Karnataka High Court Tuesday against the Ministry’s content-blocking orders issued under Section 69 (A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.