India threatened to close down Twitter until it complied with orders to limit accounts essential of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities’s dealing with of the 2021 farmer protests, the social media platform’s co-founder Jack Dorsey mentioned in an interview with YouTube news present “Breaking Points” Monday.
Dorsey, who give up as Twitter chief government in 2021, claimed that New Delhi had additionally threatened the corporate with worker raids if it didn’t adjust to authorities requests to take down particular posts.
“It manifested in methods resembling ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a really massive marketplace for us; ‘We will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; and that is India, a democratic nation,” Dorsey mentioned.
India was hit by large-scale protests by farmers, primarily from the nation’s meals basket, the Punjab province towards new legal guidelines they mentioned would threat their livelihoods.
Dismissing Dorsey’s assertions, Indian Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar referred to as them an “outright lie.”
“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had an issue accepting the sovereignty of Indian regulation,” he mentioned in a tweet.
U.S. billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter in a $44 billion deal final 12 months.
Chandrasekhar accused Twitter below Dorsey and his workforce of “repeatedly” violating Indian regulation. Without naming new CEO Elon Musk, he mentioned Twitter had been in compliance since June 2022.
Free speech activists have lengthy been criticizing Modi and his ministers who’re prolific customers of Twitter, for resorting to extreme censorship of content material they assume is essential of its working.
Meanwhile, New Delhi asserts that its content material removing orders are aimed toward defending customers and the sovereignty of the state.
Source: www.dailysabah.com