Dorsey says India threatened the tech company with shutdown and raids on employees if critical posts and accounts were not taken down.
India had threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts, co-founder Jack Dorsey said, an accusation the Indian government dismissed as an “outright lie”.
Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India threatened the company with a shutdown and raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down posts and restrict accounts that were critical of the government over protests by farmers in 2020 and 2021.
“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.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has repeatedly denied engaging in online censorship and said on Tuesday that Dorsey’s assertions were 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,” Rajeev Chandrashekhar, junior minister for information technology, said in a post on Twitter.
The protests by farmers over agricultural reforms went on for a year and were among the biggest faced by the government of Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The farmers ended the protests in late 2021 after winning concessions.
“India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers’ protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government,” Dorsey said.
During the protests, Modi’s government sought an “emergency blocking” of the “provocative” Twitter hashtag “#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” and dozens of accounts.
Twitter initially complied but later restored most of the accounts, citing “insufficient justification” to continue the suspensions.
In subsequent weeks, Indian police visited a Twitter office as part of another probe linked to tagging of some ruling party posts as manipulated. Twitter at the time said it was worried about staff safety.
Dorsey in his interview said many India content take down requests during the farmer protests were “around particular journalists that were critical of the government.”
Since Modi took office in 2014, India has slid from 140th in World Press Freedom Index to 161 this year, out of 180 countries, its lowest ranking ever.
Big Tech vs Modi
Modi and his ministers are prolific users of Twitter, but free speech activists say his administration resorts to excessive censorship of content it thinks is critical of its working.
India maintains its content removal orders are aimed at protecting users and sovereignty of the state. But rights and advocacy groups have raised concerns about human rights and free speech in India.
Dorsey’s comments again put the spotlight on the struggles faced by foreign technology giants operating under Modi’s rule. His government has often criticised Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle fake or “anti-India” content on their platforms, or for not complying with rules.
The former Twitter CEO’s comments drew widespread attention as it is unusual for global companies operating in India to publicly criticise the government.
Last year, Xiaomi in a court filing said India’s financial crime agency threatened its executives with “physical violence” and coercion, an allegation which the agency denied.
Twitter was bought by Elon Musk in a $44bn deal last year.
Indian minister Chandrasekhar said Twitter under Dorsey and his team had repeatedly violated Indian law. He did not name Musk, but added Twitter had been in compliance since June 2022.
