[1/3] Indian Deputy Minister for Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, speaks throughout an interview with Reuters at his workplace in New Delhi, India, May 19, 2023. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis
WASHINGTON/NEW DELHI, June 13 (Reuters) – India threatened to shut Twitter down except it complied with orders to prohibit accounts, co-founder Jack Dorsey stated, an accusation the Indian authorities dismissed as an “outright lie”.
Dorsey, who stop as Twitter CEO in 2021, stated on Monday that India threatened the corporate with a shutdown and raids on staff if it didn’t adjust to authorities requests to take down posts and prohibit accounts that had been important of the federal 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 stated in an interviewwith YouTube information present Breaking Points.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities has repeatedly denied partaking in on-line censorship and stated on Tuesday that Dorsey’s assertions had been 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,” Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrashekhar stated in a submit on Twitter.
The protests by farmers over agricultural reforms went on for a 12 months and had been among the many greatest confronted by the federal government of Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The farmers ended the protests in late 2021 after profitable 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 stated.
The Indian authorities says it solely goals to prohibit misinformation and posts that curb peace and safety.
During the protests, Modi’s authorities sought an “emergency blocking” of the “provocative” Twitter hashtag “#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” and dozens of accounts.
Twitter initially complied however later restored a lot of the accounts, citing “insufficient justification” to proceed the suspensions.
Dorsey additionally talked about comparable stress from governments in Turkey and Nigeria, which had restricted the platform of their nations at totally different factors over time earlier than lifting these bans.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington, Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai and Aditya Kalra in New Delhi; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Raju Gopalakrishnan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
