Centre dismisses Jack Dorsey’s claims of Twitter shutdown over farmer protests

Terming it as an “outright lie”, union minister of state for entrepreneurship, skill development, electronics and technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Monday hit out.

At the allegations levelled by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that the micro-blogging platform had faced government pressure and threats of shutdown during farmers’ protest.

In an interview to YouTube news show Breaking Points, Dorsey claimed that Twitter was threatened with shutdowns in India, Nigeria and Turkey unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts, with India wanting to curb journalists’ and protesters’ use of the social media platform.

“India for example 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’, which they did; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey claimed.

Rubbishing his claims, the union minister said that Dorsey’s Twitter regime “had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law”.

“Between 2020-2022, Twitter was violating Indian law multiple times. It started complying with the law only in 2022. During that entire period, nobody went to jail, and nobody was raided. Jack Dorsey knowing very well that Twitter did not comply with any law and didn’t face any consequence, is today lying and making stories about raids and arrests”, Chandrasekhar said.