New Delhi (13/06/2023): Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had made some strong claims about the Indian government, stating that their team faced threats of a shutdown and even raids on their homes during the Farmers’ Protests in 2020-21.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics and Technology, called the assertion an ‘outright lie’ on Twitter. He clarified that no one from Twitter’s team was raided or imprisoned.
MoS IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, “This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of twitters history.”
He further added in his tweet, “@twitter under Dorsey n his team were in repeated n continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied.”
No one was arrested, and Twitter was not “shut down,” according to Chandrasekhar.
He went on to say, “Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting Indian law’s sovereignty. It acted as if Indian laws did not apply to it. India, as a sovereign nation, has the right to ensure that all companies operating in India follow its laws.”
Dorsey particularly referenced the farmers’ protest, according to Chandrasekhar. He argued that during the protests, there was a lot of disinformation flowing and that it was the government’s job to remove such bogus news.
The union minister also chastised former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for handling the Indian market differently than their actions in the United States. He stated, “such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under Jack 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.”
Directly addressing Dorsey, Chandrasekharan alluded to a disclosure made in the Twitter Files in which Dorsey appeared to have turned a blind eye to some problematic decisions made by the company’s higher management.
“There is ample evidence now in the public domain about Jack’s Twitter’s arbitrary, blatantly partisan n discriminatory conduct and misuse of its power on its platform during that period,” Chandrasekharan said.
