India, often touted as the world’s biggest democracy, threatened Twitter into doing its bidding during the massive farmers’ protest in 2020-21, Jack Dorsey has confirmed.
“India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’, ‘we would raid the homes of your employees,’” said Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in November 2021.
“And this is India, a democratic country,” the co-founder of the microblogging platform told the YouTube channel Breaking Points yesterday (June 12).
Dorsey was referring to the year-long agitation during which thousands of farmers from the states of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh marched to Delhi and camped along its border. They were angry at new laws brought in by prime minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Earlier today, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, India’s minister of state for IT, rubbished Dorsey’s allegations.
However, Dorsey isn’t alone.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, has also referred to India’s social media regulations as “extremely strict.” In April, he said compliance with these rules was better than risking jail time for Twitter employees.
Dorsey has alleged that Nigeria and Turkey—seemingly tilting towards autocracy—also threatened it with shutdowns unless it complied with orders.
India has waved the stick at Twitter too often
Between 2014, when Modi was first elected prime minister, and 2020, the demands to block content and accounts on Twitter rose exponentially, according to the platform’s global transparency reports.
During the farmers’ protest, India asked Twitter to take down nearly 1,200 accounts for alleged links to the “Khalistan” movement, a decades-long and often violent campaign for a separate Sikh homeland. Earlier, the Modi government had asked it to block about 250 allegedly subversive accounts.
Twitter first complied and later rescinded, citing freedom of speech. This did not sit well with the government which said the platform could not “assume the role of a court and justify non-compliance.”
India also issued nearly 4,000 demands to remove content, including those posted from 114 accounts of verified journalists and news outlets during the second half of 2021, Quartz reported. The government even wanted criticism of its mishandling of covid-19 effaced from Twitter.