Guwahati: The BJP government at the Centre pressurised Twitter to ‘block’ many accounts during farmer protests and even threatened to close its offices and raid the homes of employees if the micro-blogging platform did not comply, claimed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Jack Dorsey made this shocking revelation in an interview with the YouTube news channel Breaking Points.
Dorsey claimed that Twitter received many requests to block accounts covering farmers’ protests, and journalists critical of the BJP government.
He further said that the Indian government even threatened to shut down Twitter’s operations in the country and raid the homes of its employees.
“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, 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,” Dorsey told the you channel.
He was responding to a question about receiving requests from powerful people across the world while being a supporter of free speech.
The former Twitter CEO claimed the government said that they would shut down its offices if they ‘don’t follow suit’.
“And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey further added.
Congress leader Srinivas BV tweeted the video and said, “Mother of Democracy – Unfiltered.”
Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has slammed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for accusing the Indian government of pressuring the platform during farmer protests.
“This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of twitters history,” the minister said in the tweet.