Twitter founder and former boss Jack Dorsey’s claim that the Indian government threatened to shut down the microblogging site and raided Twitter employees’ homes is facing a barrage of criticism, not only from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ministers, but also that section of Twitter that holds Dorsey responsible for the worst kind of censorship and high-handedness that any similar social media platform has ever seen internationally. Meanwhile, even as the Opposition took up Dorsey’s statement as proof that democracy was being murdered by the Narendra Modi government, others are questioning the timing of Dorsey’s claim. They are seeing it as an attempt to “disrupt” the Indian Prime Minister’s State Visit to the US next week by making it controversial.
Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar brushed off Dorsey’s claim by saying, “His (Jack Dorsey’s) comments are an outright lie. The fact is that Twitter, for a long duration between 2020 and 2022, was not complying with the Indian law, but during that period, they were neither raided nor sent to jail,” said the Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics & Technology.
In a long post on Twitter, the minister wrote, “Dorseys Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it… During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake. GoI was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news. Such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under Jack regime, that they had a problem removing misinformation from the platform in India, when they did it themselves when similar events took place in the USA. To set the record straight, no one was raided or sent to jail. Our focus was only on ensuring the compliance of Indian laws.”
Looking back at those turbulent times, it is a fact that several handles, mostly based abroad were spreading misinformation about the farmers’ protest, trying to ignite sentiments on the ground. Twitter allowed that to continue.
However, the Opposition Congress latched on to Dorsey’s claims by saying Dorsey has revealed “how murder of democracy is being done in the mother of democracy…” “When farmers were agitating at the Delhi border for more than a year, braving winter, summer and rain, they were being called ‘mawali, Khalistani, Pakistani and terrorists’ and platforms like Twitter were being told that if they show farmers, they will be shut down in India and raided,” alleged Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate.
When asked in an interview if there were pressures from foreign governments on him to comply, Dorsey had claimed, “India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers’ protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’… ‘we would raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country.”
It is a different matter that Dorsey did not mention that it was actually he—being politically aligned with the Democratic party and the so-called left liberals—who was using his social media platform as a tool to suppress voices from the right. He went to the extent of throwing out from Twitter the then President of the United States, Donald Trump. He and his ideologically motivated band of employees—often described as “liberal fundamentalists”—were throttling democracy by deplatforming those who they did not want to be heard. When not deplatforming, Twitter was shadow banning accounts that ran contrary to Dorsey and Co’s ideological inclination. Ironically, at the same time, Twitter was allowing a free run to those from the Taliban and like-minded radical groups in the name of free speech and fairness.
One of Dorsey’s worst “crimes” was suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, which claimed serious misconduct on the part of Joe Biden’s son. Twitter blocked the story link shared by the New York Post in October 2020, just ahead of the US Presidential contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. As it was revealed later by journalist Matt Taibbi, “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.” This amounted to direct interference in the US election process in favour of one candidate. It was again when Dorsey was CEO that Twitter started the extremely undemocratic practice of the largely ideological, and sometimes arbitrary, disbursal of blue ticks to users.
In fact, it was Dorsey’s mishandling of Twitter that made investors wary of the situation, and led to the eventual takeover of the platform by Elon Musk.
Once in charge of Twitter, Elon Musk made public through journalist Matt Taibbi the “Twitter Files”, to shed light on how Twitter had transmogrified into a caricature of all that it proclaimed it stood for, starting with free speech. Of interest to Indians would be the infamous “Twitter Files 17”, which exposed the most awful kind of Hinduphobia entrenched in a large section of the western left liberal ecosystem. According to Twitter Files 17, a list of 40,000 Twitter users had been compiled on suspicion that they were engaging in “inauthentic behaviour” in support of “Hindu nationalism”, specifically, supporting the BJP. The list had been compiled by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and was shared with Twitter for action.
The data was collated with the help of an extreme-left news portal in India. But as Taibbi revealed, “DFRLab said it suspected 40,000 accounts of being ‘paid employees or possibly volunteers’ of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.” Worryingly, this exercise also showed that an attempt was being made by Big Tech and forces allied to them by “cancelling” India’s ruling party, which had come to power democratically by winning a free and fair election with a landslide. Given this track record, it’s no wonder that Dorsey’s claim is being met with a lot of anger online, reminding him of how malignant Twitter was during his time, subverting democracy and free speech.
Reacting to Dorsey’s statement, the account @MumukshuSavitri tweeted, “LIAR! Instead of banning terrorists using Twitter during the Farmers Protests who spread violence in India, Jack made Twitter Files 17 with lists of innocent Indian Hindus like ME to be investigated by DFR for spreading ‘disinformation for BJP’ simply because “The Wire” said so!”
There is also speculation if Dorsey is part of the “toolkit” that has been activated nationally and internationally to take on the Narendra Modi government ahead of the 2024 elections; but more immediately, to cast a dark shadow on PM Modi’s visit to the US next week. Is the aim to hurl unfounded charges at the PM and prevent some members of the US Congress from attending his speech to the two Houses? There is already a belief that Rahul Gandhi’s visit to the US was intended to roil the waters for the Prime Minister by trying to influence American opinion makers and others against India’s PM. However, until now such attempts do not seem to have had the desired effect, given the robust nature of India-US relations, with lobbying against the visit by anti-India groups falling flat in its face.
But given the polarized nature of politics in India, the Opposition is bound to lap up Dorsey’s statements, even though Dorsey himself is one of the most discredited individuals internationally.