India threatened to shut down Twitter in the country, according to former CEO Jack Dorsey.
The claim was made in an interview with US-based YouTube channel Breaking Points, in which the former tech CEO said India requested the removal of tweets about a farmers’ protest in 2020.
He also claims the Indian government raided the homes of the social media network’s employees.
Twitter-India spat
In the interview Jack Dorsey said: “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”.
India has denied the allegations and accused Jack Dorsey of lying.
India’s deputy minister for information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said: “This is an outright lie. Perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.
“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it.”
Jack Dorsey quit as boss of the social media platform in 2021 before it was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.
Modi and his ministers are prolific users of the social network, but have a history of disagreeing with some of its policies.
In the interview, Dorsey said “countries like India and Turkey made many requests to us to take down journalists’ accounts that give tactile information and remove them from the platform”.
On the subject of Government interaction with the tech platform, he said he was “surprised at the level of engagement and requests”.
He added: “India, for example, was a country that had many requests around the farmers’ protests, around particular journalists that were critical of the government”
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