Centre dubs former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's allegations as 'outright lie'

New Delhi/Thiruvananthapuram: Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday hit out at former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for his claims that the Centre threatened to wind it down, terming them as "an outright lie."

Dorsey in an interview with the YouTube channel 'Breaking Points' claimed that the company had received “many requests” from India to block accounts covering farmers' protests and those critical of the government. Dorsey also mentioned that India had put pressure on Twitter, including threats of shutting down the platform in the country, conducting raids on employees' homes, and closing down Twitter offices, all because of their refusal to comply. The former Twitter top official stressed that these actions were taking place in a democratic country like India.

Responding to Dorsey, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Technology in a Tweet stated, "This is an outright lie by @jack - perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of twitters history."

The Union Minister also said that Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in "repeated and continuous violations of India law". "As a matter of fact, they were in non-compliance with the law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied. No one went to jail nor was Twitter 'shutdown'," Chandrasekhar said.

Chandrasekhar further claimed that the Twitter regime under Dorsey "had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law." "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," the Union Minister said.

According to Chandrasekhar, during the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake "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," the minister said.

Chandrasekhar further attacked Twitter saying, "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." According to the Minister, no one was raided or sent to jail and the government's focus was only on ensuring the compliance of Indian laws.

"There is ample evidence now in the public domain about Jack's Twitter's arbitrary, blatantly partisan, and discriminatory conduct and misuse of its power on its platform during that period. Twitter under Dorsey was not just violating the Indian law but was partisan in how it was using 'deamplify' and 'de-platforming' of some arbitrarily in violation of Articles 14,19 of our constitution and also assisting in the weaponising of misinformation," the Minister said.