The Indian government retaliated on Tuesday, June 13, after former Twitter executive and co-founder Jack Dorsey claimed on YouTube on Monday that Indian authorities had threatened to “shut down Twitter in India” or raid the home of its employees if the network does not comply with their demands. “This is an outright lie,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s information technology minister, said in a Twitter post. He added that “no one [had] gone to jail, and Twitter [had] not been shut down.”
Twitter “behaved as if Indian laws did not apply to him,” the minister wrote in a lengthy statement posted on the social network. “They were struggling to take down the fake news on the network in India,” he added.
The government of the world’s most populous country was the fourth largest issuer of content removal requests on Twitter in 2022, behind Japan, Russia and Turkey, according to the social network, which regularly removes or blocks them on complaint. from New Delhi.
In March 2023, Twitter blocked the accounts of several journalists during the run of a Sikh separatist preacher in the state of Punjab (North). At the height of the Covid pandemic in 2021, the government ordered Twitter and Facebook to delete dozens of messages critical of its management of the health crisis.
Earlier this year, Narendra Modi’s administration raided BBC offices in New Delhi and Bombay weeks after the British broadcaster aired a documentary about the 2002 Gujarat riots and the alleged role of Narendra Modi in the violence in his country.
Since the Hindu nationalist government of Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, India has fallen 21 places in Reporters Without Borders’ world press freedom index, dropping to 161st place (out of 180) in 2023.