Jack Dorsey says Indian government threatened to ‘shut Twitter down’ and raid staff homes

Former Twitter chief says platform was constantly bombarded with ‘many requests’ for takedowns from governments in Turkey and India

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has accused the Indian government of putting pressure on the social media company to block accounts critical of the government amid the long-running farmers’ protest in 2021.

Mr Dorsey, who was still the platform’s chief at the time before its takeover by Elon Musk, said India placed “many requests” during the months-long farmers protests.

“India for example, India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government,” the former Twitter chief, who stepped down from the company’s board last year, said in a new interview with the YouTube channel Breaking Points.

“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,” Mr Dorsey said.

The protests in 2021 forced the Indian government to repeal laws that would have seen the biggest reforms to Indian agriculture in decades. Farmers drove tractors from agrarian states surrounding Delhi to block traffic on major roads into the capital city.

Amid the protests, the Indian government allegedly threatened to punish Twitter employees with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for failing to suspend accounts deemed critical of the Modi administration.

It demanded that Twitter block over a thousand accounts, including those tweeting under the hashtag “ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide”, arguing that the phrase was inflammatory.

Following this, the social media company made over 250 accounts inaccessible to its India-based users, including that of the investigative news magazine The Caravan. The move was later reversed after a major public outcry.

Twitter told the Indian government at the time that it would not comply with the directive to ban some accounts and tweets as they either constituted “free speech” or were “newsworthy”.

Mr Dorsey compared India’s behaviour to that of Turkey. “We had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their in their courts and often won but they threatened to shut us down constantly,” he said.

Indian IT minister Rajeev Chandrashekar rejected the former Twitter chief’s claims that the Modi government put pressure on the social media company, calling it “an outright lie,” and “an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.”

“Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in repeated [and] continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied,” Mr Chandrashekar said.

The minister alleged that Twitter had a problem accepting the “sovereignty of India law,” and behaved “as if the laws of India did not apply to it”.

“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’ ... India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India,” Mr Chandhrashekar said.

“During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake,” the minister said, adding that the Indian government “was obligated to remove” them from the platform as it had the potential to “further inflame the situation based on fake news”.

Mr Dorsey also commented on Twitter’s regime under Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, calling some of his moves “fairly reckless”.

After taking over Twitter in October, Mr Musk proceeded to cut costs at the company and slash over three quarters of the firm’s workforce.

“I think it set up a dynamic where he had to be very hasty, he had to be impatient, and he had to move as quickly as possible with features even if they weren’t fully thought out... It all looked fairly reckless,” Mr Dorsey said.