India threatened to shut down Twitter, says ex-CEO Jack Dorsey; govt says ‘outright lie’

 There has been a significant surge in legal demands being made by India — from various courts and the government — to remove content from Twitter between 2014 and 2020, an analysis of Twitter’s global transparency reports by The Indian Express had earlier shown.

ex-CEO Jack Dorsey

Twitter’s co-founder and former boss Jack Dorsey has reiterated that the platform received “many requests” from the Indian government to block accounts covering farmers’ protests and those critical of the government. He has also said that the platform was threatened with “a shut down” and conducting raids at its employees’ homes in the country.

Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded to Dorsey’s claims, saying that under him, Twitter was in “repeated and continuous violations of India law” and at times “weaponised misinformation”.

It is worth noting that Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk also has a similar view of India’s social media regulations, having previously called them “strict”. In April this year, Musk had said that he would rather comply with the government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail.
​Read more