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

India's Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday hit back at a claim that New Delhi threatened Twitter as an "outright lie."

The social media platform's co-founder, Jack Dorsey, said the Indian government had demanded the platform restrict accounts critical of its handling of farmer protests, or face the ax.

What were the allegations?

Dorsey, who resigned from the helm at Twitter 2021, said India had also threatened to carry out raids on Twitter's employees if the company did not adhere to the demand that it delete certain 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 in an online interview.

The former Twitter boss's comments highlighted the pressure faced by foreign technology platforms operating under the rule of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Modi's government has often slammed firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter for not failing to curb fake or "anti-India" posts or for not complying with rules.

Denial via Twitter

Chandrasekhar, who is a top-ranking official in Modi's government, hit back at Dorsey's assertion, saying it was untrue.

"This is an outright lie," Chandrasekhar tweeted, adding that it was "perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter's history."

Chandrasekhar maintained that Dorsey and his team were in non-compliance with Indian law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022, and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied.

He said 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."

"To set the record straight, no one was raided or sent to jail. Our focus was only on ensuring the compliance of Indian laws."

According to Twitter, India last year was ranked at number four in terms of how many requests were made by governments to remove content — after Japan, Russia and Turkey.

During the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in India in 2021, the government ordered Twitter and Facebook to remove dozens of posts critical of the government's handling of the outbreak.

The global media observer Reporters Without Borders said social media suspensions amid mass farmer protests in India in the same year had been a "shocking case of blatant censorship."

According to rights groups, freedom of expression is at risk in India — the country having dropped 21 spots to 161 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index since Modi took office in 2014.