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Islamabad: Jack Dorsey, former CEO and Twitter’s Co-founder states that India despite beings the world’s largest democracy, had threatens to shut down the platform,account it’s employees and conduct a raid at their homes in the country unless it accepted the requests for censorship.
In an interview, Jack Dorsey said, “Twitter had received many requests from Indian government to block accounts covering farmers protest and those critical of the government”.
“It manifested in ways such as, We will shut down Twitter in India, which is a very large market for us, we will raid the home sof your employees, which they did, and this is India, a democratic country”.
Previously, in 2021, when nationwide farmer protests were at their heaviest, the Indian government requested Twitter remove nearly 1,200 accounts for alleged “Khalistan” connections. It had previously requested the platform to delete more than 250 accounts.
However, during the protests, the Indian government sought an “emergency blocking” of the provocative “Twitter hashtag” using #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” and dozens of accounts
Former Twitter CEO @Jack Dorsey in an interview to @esaagar @krystalball on Breaking Points talks about Worlds Largest Democracy,
“India for example, India is one of the country which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of… pic.twitter.com/unF6dVmv0O— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) June 12, 2023
The majority of the accounts were later retired by Twitter after the final compilation was done. It cited “insufficient justification” to continue the suspensions.
Later, as a part of another investigation into the labeling of some posts from the ruling party as manipulated, the Indian police also paid a visit to a Twitter office. Twitter had previously expressed concern for employee safety.
According to Jack Dorsey, “many requests for the content takedown during the farmer protests were around particular journalists that were critical of the government”.
In contrast, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new CEO keeps a similar point of view of India’s social media regulations, having previously called them “strict”.
Current year, April Musk said that “he would rather comply with the government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail”.
However, an earlier analysis of Twitter’s global transparency reports by the news revealed that there had been a sharp increase in legal requests from India between 2014 and 2020 for the government and various courts to take down content from Twitter.
In 2021, for the initial six months, Twitter was asked by different Indian courts and the government to block a little more than 4,900 tweets.
On the other hand, in July 2022, Twitter had taken legal action against some of the government officials’ missives ordering it to take down certain material posted on the micro logging site.
The social media company moved the Karnataka High Court against the Ministry’s content-blocking orders issued under section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act 2000.
Alas, Modi took off in 2014, India has backed from 140th in the world to 161 in the current year in World Press Freedom Index, out of 180 countries, it’s lowest ranking ever.
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