Twitter Has To Obey Local Govt Laws: Elon Musk Counters Jack Dorsey’s Charge Against India

International

oi-Deepika S

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday emphasised that Twitter had no choice but to adhere to the regulations imposed by the Indian government, stating that failure to do so would result in the platform being shut down.

“Twitter does not have a choice but to follow the local government. Or it will get shut down, Musk said countering Jack Dorsey’s recent allegation against the Indian government.

Musk’s statement came after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on his official state visit to the US.

“The best we can do is to follow the laws in any given country,” he said, adding that it is impossible for “us to do more than that”. “There are different rules and regulations for different forms of governments, and we will do our best to provide the freest speech that is possible under the law”, Musk said.

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Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey kicked up a row recently by claiming that the social media firm faced shutdown threats in India from the Narendra Modi government.

What did Jack Dorsey say?

In a YouTube Show ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’, Jack Dorsey claimed that Twitter had received many requests from India to block accounts covering farmers’ protests and those critical of the government. During the interview, Dorsey said, “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.”

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar strongly denied Dorsey’s allegation of receiving many requests from India to censor reporting on farmers’ protests, as well as threats of shutting down the platform.

Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law, and it behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it, Chandrasekhar said.

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“India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India,” the Minister said. During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake, the Minister said adding that the government was obligated to remove misinformation from the platform as it had the potential to further inflame the situation based on fake news.

“Such was the level of partisan behaviour on Twitter under Jack regime, that they had a problem removing misinformation from the platform in India, when they did it themselves when similar events took place in the USA,” Chandrasekhar said.