India denies Jack Dorsey’s ‘outright lie’ it threatened to shut down Twitter

Dorsey said India also threatened Twitter with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts

Under PM Narendra Modi’s rule, foreign tech giants are often criticised for not doing enough to tackle fake or ‘anti-India’ content on their platforms

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The world’s biggest democracy petitions Twitter for content removals more than almost any other country, and the platform regularly takes down or blocks content at the request of Indian authorities. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:30pm, 13 Jun 2023

India on Tuesday denied claims it had threatened to shut down Twitter inside the country if it did not block accounts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The world’s biggest democracy petitions Twitter for content removals more than almost any other country, and the platform regularly takes down or blocks content at the request of Indian authorities.

India threatened to shut down Twitter in the country unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the handling of farmer protests, co-founder Jack Dorsey said, an accusation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government called an “outright lie”.

Jack Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said that India had also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts. Photo: Reuters

Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India had also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts.

“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; And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points.

Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar lashed out against Dorsey in response, calling his assertions an “outright lie”.

“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a post on Twitter.

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