Jack Dorsey’s ‘Twitter Files’ on Indian Govt: Why Centre Sees It As Just ‘Partisan’ Chirps

Rebutting Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s allegations that “the Centre threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts during farmers’ protest”, the Indian government has questioned those, from the opposition and otherwise, believing them, given the platform’s “partisan past”.

Dorsey made the sensational allegations in an interview with the YouTube news show Breaking Points on Monday. “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,” he said, talking about pressure Twitter under him faced from the Indian government.

In a detailed rebuttal, MoS for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Tuesday that Twitter violated Indian laws “multiple times between 2020 and 2022” and it was only “in June 2022 when they finally complied”. “This is an outright lie — perhaps 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 the India law,” Chandrasekhar wrote.

“To set the record straight, no one was raided or sent to jail. Our focus was only on ensuring the compliance of Indian laws. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it,” he wrote.

QUESTIONS RAISED ON TWITTER

Part one of ‘Twitter Files’ was released on December 2, 2022 in which journalist Matt Taibii, who first gained access to the document, revealed that Democrats would send emails to the microblogging site with links of tweets that were against the interest of the party in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections, and Twitter would reply by saying “we’ll handle them”.

The exposé also revealed Twitter’s decision to censor the story around President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop. “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story” claimed, in a series of tweets, that the microblogging site took “extraordinary steps” to suppress the story on Joe Biden’s secret emails from Hunter’s laptop published by the New York Post in October 2020.

Twitter removed the links of the story from its platform and warned the users that the content may be “unsafe”. It even blocked sharing of links via direct messages using a tool “hitherto reserved for extreme cases such as child pornography”.

Taibii revealed that the decision was made at the higher levels of the company, and Dorsey was not involved. He alleged that Twitter’s former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadda had a key role in decision making.

The second tranche of docuseries, which was unveiled by another independent journalist, Bari Weiss, claimed that Twitter had a “secret blacklist”, before Elon Musk took over the company, which it uses to censor voice of right-wing commentators.

OPPN ATTACK: PRAISE IGNORED, FLAK MAGNIFIED?

The Opposition was quick to attack the government.

Trinamool Congress leader Saket Gokhale said that BJP government has turned social media in India into their “personal propaganda tool”. “Anything that criticized the government or the BJP is clamped down. The central government, as is now revealed, has brazenly violated laws to intimidate social media companies into crushing criticism,” he added.

Congress leader Srinivas BV uploaded Jack’s statement and said “Mother of Democracy – Unfiltered”.

Rajya Sabha MP and leader of Shiv Sena-UBT Priyanka Chaturvedi replying to Chandrasekhar’s tweet, said the law Twitter broke was to “allow hate speech and rabid BJP agenda”. “Twitter under Dorsey n his team were in repeated n continuous violations of Indian law. Say MoS IT. Lol! Yeah the law they broke was to allow hate speech and rabid BJP agenda. But there was no crackdown or compliance issues since it supported their agenda. The minute people and opposition started to fight back using the platform, the government started to crackdown! So please, spare this little sermon,” Chaturvedi tweeted.

Many, however, feel it is a case of selective highlighting. Their rationale — there have been several instances of foreign institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Health Organisation (WHO), etc. praising various efforts of the government. But the opposition parties never took note of these. However, when any foreign individual, or a random rating agency attacks the country, the opposition uses it in its arsenal to hype up the charges.

WHY ONE YEAR LATER?

Those in support of the government also find the timing of the revelation questionable. The claims come just after the visit of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s visit to USA, raising doubts if the “deep state connections” have been activated.

It is also aimed to impact the prospects of the PM’s upcoming historic tour to USA, even though the issues are over a year old.