New Delhi: The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tuesday were caught in a war of words in the wake of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s damning statements about the Indian government’s alleged censorship demands at the time of the farmers’ protest in the country.
“The mother of democracy is seeing the murder of democracy in broad daylight and people are being coaxed into submission,” Congress spokesperson and chairperson of the party’s social media department Supriya Shrinate said at a press conference at the party headquarters.
BJP national general secretary B. L. Santosh, meanwhile, condemned the Congress response to Dorsey’s charges and advised the opposition party to “grow up”.
At the press conference, Shrinate, citing Dorsey’s statement, alleged that the Modi government had asked Twitter to block accounts showing the farmers’ protests, failing which the company would be raided.
“Twitter has become a platform for expressing public opinion. It is also a platform where news is generated. It is also a platform where the common citizens of the country can voice their concerns, opinions and what’s ailing them. Jack Dorsey has nothing to gain from this. He asserts that when farmers’ agitation was happening in India against the three farm laws, the Modi establishment pressured Twitter to block accounts that were showing farmer protests otherwise they and their employees would be raided and Twitter would be shut down in India,” she said.
“It all ties up together. In May 2021, when the farmer agitation was at its peak, the BJP fake news factory and multiple leaders had tweeted (about) an alleged tool kit which was tagged as manipulated media. And Twitter was then raided on 24 May, 2021. It happened because the idea was to suppress the farmer agitation,” she said, adding that the idea was to send out the message that anybody standing with the farmers will be scared like this. “But what is the PM so scared about?”
In an interview to a YouTube channel, Twitter founder and former CEO Dorsey has said that the Indian government had threatened to block the platform in the country.
“India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers’ protests, around particular journalists that were critical of the government,” Dorsey said in the interview. “And it manifested in ways such as, ‘We shut down Twitter in India’, which is a very large market for us. ‘We’re going to 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.”
After Dorsey’s statements created waves, Electronics & Technology minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called the Twitter ex-CEO’s statement ‘an outright lie’.
“As a matter of fact they (Twitter) were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied. No one went to jail nor was twitter “shutdown”. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it,” he said in a statement.
Former IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also said that the social media giant did not comply with Indian laws at the time.
Senior BJP leader Santosh called out the Congress party’s tendency to jump “like a bunch of vultures”.
“Some zero credibility person opens up mouth in west & our Congress and their ecosystem starts jumping like a bunch of vultures. Grow up Congis. Here is a Govt & society which works of India, for India, by India,” he tweeted.
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‘Intimidating social media’
Piling up the pressure on the government, Shrinate alleged that it was intimidating social media platforms to block voices of the opposition.
“In August 2021, the Twitter account of Rahul Gandhi was blocked and from August 2021 to February 2022 — for a period of six months — there was no subscriber growth in his account. It was only when the Wall Street Journal wrote to Twitter that they were going to do a story about the account suspension and dormancy in growth of subscribers, is suddenly when the shadow ban was lifted and his subscribers saw multiple times more growth. Why should I not say that this happened at the behest of the Modi government?” she asked.
It was due to Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra which showed a “mirror” to the government that such methods were being used, the Congress spokesperson said.
On the ‘breach’ of CoWin vaccination data to which the government has stated that it was data leaked from a previous breach, Shrinate posed several questions to the dispensation regarding the security of digital information.
“Did you report the previous breach? When did the previous breach happen? Do we know who’s using this data? What is it being used for? How did a third party get access to this?” Shrinate asked.
“Each time you lie you open a Pandora’s Box. So, the reality is that you cannot keep the data of crores of Indians safe but you want to point fingers, you want to coax platforms into submission because they show you the truth,” she added.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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