Union minister and senior BJP leader Anurag Thakur took a dig at former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s claim that India tried to ‘pressurize’ Twitter during the farmers’ protest. Thakur said that Dorsey has woken up after years of slumber and that too when elections are round the corner in India.
Anurag Thakur told news agency ANI, ‘What was said is a lie. Jack Dorsey wakes up after years of slumber and wants to cover up his misdeeds. When Twitter was bought by another person, the ‘Twitter Files’ revealed whether the platform was being misused. Jack Dorsey has not been able to answer this till date as he was exposed… When elections come in India many foreign forces wake up…”
Earlier in the day, Deputy Minister of Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar also lashed out against Dorsey in response, calling his statements “absolutely false”.
He said in a post on Twitter, “No one went to jail and Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem with accepting the sovereignty of Indian law.”
Meanwhile, former IT minister RS Prasad said, “At that time, Twitter did not follow Indian laws. It is clear that all social media platforms are respected in India but they have to follow the law of the land.”
Dorsey, who is set to resign as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to remove certain positions.
“It appeared like this: ‘We will shut down Twitter in India’, which is a huge 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 interview with the YouTube news show Breaking Points.
Meanwhile, many leaders of the opposition party came in his support and said that Dorsey had no reason to lie.
(with inputs from agencies)
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Updated: June 13, 2023, 01:12 PM IST