Meenakashi Lekhi, Union Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs, responded to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s comment about “government pressure” from India on Tuesday by labelling the microblogging platform a manipulative medium.
She encouraged Twitter CEO Elon Musk to verify the company’s holdings by opening the files of Twitter India and the Indian government.
In response to Dorsey’s assertion that the Indian government had compelled the microblogging site to restrict accounts during the farmers’ protests, Meenakashi Lekhi said, “Twitter is a manipulated medium. All I can say is that Elon Musk as a new owner of Twitter has opened some files which are called Twitter files US and lot many things which are illegal, unethical have been found which were being practiced by the then chief and the company which he recently took over.”
Speaking to the sources, Lekhi said, “I am requesting Elon Musk to open the files of Twitter India and also the government of India to investigate Twitter India and Twitter Asia and they must also check the shareholding of this company.”
In response to question regarding the Opposition parties’ statement that freedom is under threat in India, Meenakashi Lekhi said, “That is why I’m saying please check the shareholding and check the financial transactions. You will be surprised to what I think people like me are aware of.”
For the moment, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, criticised Jack Dorsey on Tuesday for calling the Indian government ‘pressure’.
According to Chandrashekhar, Twitter repeatedly broke Indian law between 2020 and 2022, and it wasn’t until 2022 that the network began to abide by the law.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded to Dorsey’s assertion by calling it ‘an outright lie’ and ‘an attempt to brush out the very dubious period’ of the social media company’s history.
He asserted that Twitter turned misleading information against Indians and the Indian government during the year 2020.
Speaking to the sources, Chandrasekhar said, “During the period of 2020, Twitter weaponised misinformation against Indians and the government of India and therefore they were exposed. Twitter that is now in public domain, during this period was not only partisan but was behaving in an absolute arbitrary manner and the Twitter files that have then come out after Jack Dorsey sold Twitter has exposed it to be a platform that abused its power, misused its power.”
“During 2020-2022, Twitter was violating Indian law multiple times. It started complying with the law only in 2022. During that entire period, nobody went to jail, and nobody was raided. Jack Dorsey knowing very well that Twitter did not comply with any law and didn’t face any consequence, is today lying and making stories about raids and arrests,” Chandrasekhar said.
The minister claimed that Dorsey’s rewriting of Twitter’s past behaviour was a blatant lie. His comments came after Jack Dorsey said that the Indian government had exerted pressure on Twitter and threatened to shut down the firm in India and raid the homes of its employees in an interview with the US-based YouTube channel ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’.
Dorsey in an interview aired on the YouTube channel said, “…..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, India is a big marketplace for us. We would raid the homes of your employees, which they did and we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit and this is India, a democratic country.”
About Twitter
The American corporation X Corp., which took over from Twitter, Inc., owns and runs Twitter, an online social media and social networking website. The Ireland-based Twitter International Unlimited Company is legally able to provide services to users outside of the US, making them subject to EU and Irish data protection legislation.
Users post “tweets”—text, images, and video—on Twitter. Unregistered users can only watch public tweets, however registered users can tweet, like, “retweet,” and direct message (DM) other registered users.
On August 23, 2022, information regarding a whistleblower complaint submitted to the US Congress by former information security chief Peiter Zatko became available. Zatko was let go by Twitter in January 2022. The complaint alleges that Twitter failed to disclose a number of data breaches, took lax security measures, violated US securities laws, and disregarded the terms of a prior data protection agreement it had with the Federal Trade Commission.
Acquisition undertaken by Elon Musk
Beginning in early 2022, business tycoon Elon Musk discussed buying Twitter, Inc., expressing his concerns about the company’s commitment to free speech and whether Twitter’s moderation procedures were hurting democracy. According to reports, Musk had big plans for Twitter’s approach to spambots, a more lenient content moderation policy, a redesign of the services it provided, and cost savings. Musk stated that he intended to make Twitter become a “everything app” similar to WeChat in the long run.
Musk initially tried to join the Twitter, Inc. Board of Directors by purchasing business shares; however, the Board put in place a “poison pill” to stop Musk from acquiring an adequate number of shares. On April 14, 2022, Musk then made an impromptu offer to purchase Twitter, Inc. for $43 billion. Following several commercial and legal disputes, Musk finally completed the transaction on October 27, 2022, for a price of $44 billion. Musk sacked the top three Twitter execs right away. A week later, he started dismissing roughly half of the company’s 7,500 workers.
