Tuesday, October 22

Jack Dorsey: India threatened to close down Twitter, raid worker properties

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated the Indian authorities made repeated requests for Twitter to take down posts and threatened drastic motion in opposition to the social media web site if its requests weren’t met.

Mr. Dorsey stated that in his time at Twitter, the Indian authorities was targeted on limiting the variety of posts about farmers’ protests in India. He stated journalists and activists had been usually the targets of requests.

The requests “manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’, ‘we would 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,” Mr. Dorsey informed Breaking Points.



Twitter publicly fought in opposition to India’s overreaching web laws. In reality, the corporate famously sued the Indian authorities to contest among the requests to dam or in any other case censor materials. This led to 2 unannounced visits to Twitter’s places of work by Indian authorities, in accordance with Mr. Dorsey.

Indian officers disagree with Mr. Dorsey’s interpretation of occasions and say that Twitter acted as if it had been above the legislation.

“It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it. India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India. During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide, which were definitely fake,” Deputy Minister for Information Technology in India Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated. “The government of India was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news.”

Twitter’s gentle resistance to India’s censorship efforts underneath Mr. Dorsey stands in sharp distinction to the corporate’s place underneath Elon Musk. A current report discovered that Twitter underneath Mr. Musk has agreed to censor almost each submit a overseas authorities needs. The report exhibits the corporate complying with Turkey and India’s governments to dam or limit dozens of accounts.

That contrasted with Mr. Dorsey’s banning of many right-wing American voices on Twitter. Mr. Musk reversed such bans, making him wildly widespread with conservatives.

Content Source: www.washingtontimes.com