Government rejects ex-Twitter CEO Dorsey’s ‘shut down’ claim

Responding to Jack Dorsey’s claims that Twitter is getting threatened to be shut down in India, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar, on Tuesday, said that this is a lie. Jack Dorsey is ex-Twitter CEO and had allegedly claimed that the Indian government put pressure on the company to block accounts covering farmers’ protest.

Chandrashekhar stated that Dorsey’s claim is an ‘outright lie’ and is an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of company’s history. Dorsey, speaking in a YouTube show ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’, alleged that the Indian government threatened to shut down Twitter in India and raid the houses of Twitter staff here.

Chandrashekhar, responding to these serious allegations, clarified that Jack Dorsey repeatedly violated Indian law between 2020-22 and complied only in June 2022, weeks after Elon Musk started acquiring Twitter. He alleged that Twitter had an issue accepting the ‘sovereignty of Indian law’.

Chandrashekhar wrote in a tweet, “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shutdown’…India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India.”

“There was a lot of misinformation and fake reports of genocide doing rounds on Twitter during the farmers’ protest in 2021, and the Indian government was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news,” the minister said.