New Delhi: After Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey claimed that the platform received ‘many requests’ from the Indian government to block accounts covering farmers’ protests, Congress launched an all-out attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the centre asking why it was desperately ‘trying to gag the voices’ of truth and opposition and crush all those who were trying to ask questions.
‘What is PM Modi afraid of?’ asked Supriya Shrinate, the Congress spokesperson and Chairperson of the Social Media and Digital Platforms of the party during a press conference here on Tuesday. Reacting to the allegations made by Dorsey, who claimed that Twitter faced pressure and intimidation from the Modi government during farmers’ agitation, she said, Prime Minister Modi was behaving like a coward and trying to muzzle all the voices of dissent and those who were trying to ask genuine questions.
The Congress spokesperson ridiculed the tame defence of the government that Dorsey was lying. ‘What does Dorsey gain from lying?’ she asked, while adding, it is the government, which is trying to lie and hide behind the lies. Shrinate said Dorsey’s revelations vindicated the charges of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi that democracy was under threat in India. ‘There cannot be bigger proof than this’, she remarked. She pointed out how the government during the peak of the farmers’ agitation raided Twitter offices on May 24 in 2021. ‘Why was the government scared of a 21-year-old young environmental activist or the internationally acclaimed famous singer Rihana’? she further said.
Substantiating her charges that the government was trying to muzzle the voice of opposition and force the social media platform into submission, she pointed out how Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter handle was suspended and later kept under ‘shadow blocking’ as no followers and subscribers were being added for about six months. ‘The US-based newspaper exposed the reality and told Twitter that it was going ahead with the story of ‘shadow blocking’ Rahul Gandhi’s account, it was normalized and within no time the subscriber base increased manifold. This was proof enough that there was a deliberate attempt not to allow Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter followers to grow’, she added.
In an interview with the YouTube channel ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’, on Monday, Dorsey who stepped down from Twitter’s board last year, alleged that the Indian government had put pressure on Twitter and said that it will shut down the company in India and raid the houses of its employees. Jack Dorsey in the interview said that there were requests around farmers’ protests to shut Twitter in the country. ‘…..India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers’ protests, around particular journalists who were critical of the government and it manifested in ways such as we will shut Twitter down in India, India is a big marketplace for us. We would raid the homes of your employees, which they did and we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit and this is India, a democratic country, ‘ Dorsey is heard saying in the interview on the YouTube channel’, he said.
However, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded to Dorsey’s claims, saying that under him, Twitter was in ‘repeated and continuous violations of India law’ and at times ‘weaponised misinformation’. In November 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the repeal of the three Central farm laws. In his address to the nation, PM Modi said then, ‘Today I want to tell everyone that we have decided to repeal all three farm laws’. Farmers staged a protest in large numbers against the government’s three farm laws since the Centre passed the laws in 2020.
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