India threatened to shut down Twitter unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government’s handling of the 2021 farmer protests, the social media platform's co-founder Jack Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show "Breaking Points" Monday.
Dorsey, who quit as Twitter chief executive in 2021, claimed that New Delhi had also threatened the company with employee raids if it did not comply with government requests to take down specific posts.
"It manifested in ways such as ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a very large market for us; ‘We will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; and this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said.
India was hit by large-scale protests by farmers, mainly from the country's food basket, the Punjab province against new laws they said would risk their livelihoods.
Dismissing Dorsey's assertions, Indian Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar called them an "outright lie.”
"No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a tweet.
U.S. billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion deal last year.
Chandrasekhar accused Twitter under Dorsey and his team of "repeatedly" violating Indian law. Without naming new CEO Elon Musk, he said Twitter had been in compliance since June 2022.
Free speech activists have long been criticizing Modi and his ministers who are prolific users of Twitter, for resorting to excessive censorship of content they think is critical of its working.
Meanwhile, New Delhi asserts that its content removal orders are aimed at protecting users and the sovereignty of the state.
