Elon Musk responds to Jack Dorsey’s claim that India threatened to boot out Twitter

Twitter boss Elon Musk after meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at theNew York Palace Hotel in New York City on Tuesday commented on the recent statements made by his predecessor Jack Dorsey. Twitter founder andformer CEO Dorsey had recently claimed that the social media platform received threats of being booted out of Indiaafter not accepting the request to block certain accounts at the peak of the farmers' protest by the government.

“Twitter doesn't have a choice but to obey local governments. If we don't obey local government laws then we will get shut down," Musk told the reporters.

"The best we can do is to follow the laws in any given country," the billionaire said, adding that it is impossible for "us to do more than that".

"We will do the best to revive the freest speech possible under the law," he concluded.

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What did Dorsey say?

“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; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don't follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country," said Dorsey.

Dorsey, who left Twitter last year afterMusk took over the company, added that Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behaved in a similar way to India. Ankara reportedly threatened to shut down Twitter and later got embroiled in a legal battle with the microblogging platform.

“Turkey is very similar (to India), like we had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their courts and often won, but they threatened to shut us down constantly,”said Dorsey.

He added that Twitter could not put its employees on the ground in Nigeria, out of fear what the government might do to them.

How did India respond?

Union Minister of State forElectronics & Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar posted a rebuttal where he said Dorsey was attempting to "brush out a very dubious period of Twitter's history".

"Twitter under Dorsey andhis team were in repeated and continuous violations of Indian laws. 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," said Chandrasekhar.

"During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake. GoI was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform because it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news," the minister added.

The farmers' protests started after the Modi government brought three controversial farm laws. Thousands of farmers from across the country camped in and around the capital city of Delhi for nearly a year, forcing the government to repeal the laws in November 2021.

(With inputs from agencies)

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