Jack Dorsey, former CEO and co-founder of Twitter said Twitter had received threats from India, Nigeria and Turkey to shut down the company unless it complied with their government orders to restrict account.
Dorsey said while an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points that It manifested in ways such as We will shut Twitter down in India, which is a very large market for us, We will raid the homes of your employees, which they did, and this is India, a democratic country.
Indian police visited Twitter office in subsequent weeks as a part of another inquiry linked to tagging of some of the ruling party’s post as manipulated, and we were worried about staff safety, he added.
Dorsey further added during the farmer protest in 2020 and 2021, the Indian government sought an emergency blocking of some provocative Twitter hashtags including #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide and dozen of the account. he was so surprised about the level of engagement and requests by the governments of the world to censor content on the Twitter platform during his period.
India’s deputy minister for Information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said Jack Dorsey’s assertions an outright lie. he further said in a post on Twitter, “No one went to jail nor was Twitter shut down” Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law.
Nigeria, Turkey
Jack Dorsey further said that Twitter also had similar kind of pressure from the government of Nigeria and Turkey. both had restricted the Twitter in their nation at different points over the years before lifting bans. Former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari had a fractious relationship with Twitter from May 2015 to May 2023.
In June 2021 Nigeria’s IT minister Lai Mohammed said that Dorsey was responsible for the destruction of the state property and lose of lives during the protest against anti-police brutality in Oct 2020, we could not even put our employees on the ground in the country out of fear of what the Nigerian government might do to them.