Twitter was misusing its power: Chandrasekhar after Jack Dorsey's 'pressure' claim

Thiruvananthapuram: Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday hit out at the “fiction” put out by former Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey who said that the Indian government had threatened to shut down the social media network in the country.

The minister alleged that between 2020 and 2022, Twitter was found violating Indian law multiple times and the platform had started to comply with the law only in 2022.

Reacting to Twitter co-founder Dorsey’s claim that the Indian government had put pressure on the microblogging platform to block accounts during the farmers’ protests, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology said it “an outright lie” and “an attempt to brush out the very dubious period” of the social media company’s history.

Chandrasekhar said that the company during the period of 2020 Twitter under Dorsey had “weaponised misinformation” against Indians and the government.

In his Monday interview with US-based YouTube channel ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’, Dorsey who stepped down from Twitter’s board last year, had also 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.

Talking to ANI exclusively, Chandrasekhar said, “During the period of 2020, Twitter weaponised misinformation against Indians and the government of India and therefore they were exposed.

Twitter that is now in public domain, during this period was not only partisan but was behaving in an absolute arbitrary manner and the Twitter files that have then come out after Jack Dorsey sold Twitter has exposed it to be a platform that abused its power misused its power.”