As the race to India’s 2024 Lok Sabha polls begins, Congress’ internecine and facetious efforts to score political brownie points by latching onto any opportunity to appease their hard-left and liberal voter base have taken pace. In a recent interview with the news show ‘Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar’, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in an embellished fiction, juxtaposed India and Turkey while alleging that the micro-blogging site received “many threats” from the Indian government during the farmers’ protests to take down posts and restrict accounts of “particular journalists that were critical of the government.”
Dorsey, who was excommunicated from Twitter in 2021, said, “India, for example, is one of the countries that had many requests around farmer protests and around particular journalists who were critical of the government. 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.”
Even for Twitter, it’s a little too rich and a little too late! The former CEO’s tall claims can bite the dust considering the recent years when he and his company courted headlines for everything political. Big Tech’s inherent ideological left-proclivity and its profound influence on public discourse are not disputed. Not even by Jack!
In an interview with CNN in 2018, Dorsey admitted the already-obvious fact that Twitter, like most of its counterparts in Silicon Valley, has more Left-leaning employees. However, Jack added that political bias does not influence how Twitter determines what is and is not appropriate behaviour on the platform.
However, Jack’s shallow words were reflected in the company’s ignorance by appointing Raheel Khursheed and Mahima Kaul as Twitter India heads. On February 19, 2011, Raheel tweeted: “Those of you who expect Kashmir to be yours—in India or Pakistan—when was the last time you did anything about it? Other than loudly claiming it?” On September 18, 2011, Mahima Kaul tweeted: “Guess we’ll find out about damage (earthquake)/floods/bombs if the news gets their heads out of modis ass.” On February 6, 2012, Khursheed tweeted: “U say Narendra Modi for PM? I say Narendra Modi in jail for being a mass murderer.” These tweets of the then-Twitter India bosses should suffice to demonstrate the public display of the insolency and scorn these chaps had for the ruling Indian government and the serving PM of India.
Not to forget, in June 2021, Twitter displayed an incorrect map of India depicting Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh as separate countries but removed it later, facing national ire, censure, and government attention. In the past, Jack too has had a vivid history of anti-Hindu actions, including posing for an infamous picture in November 2018 with a Hinduphobic placard that said, “Smash Brahminical patriarchy!” The placard promotes hate speech and targets an unassuming community, and his ignorant apology for being clueless about the contents of the posters makes it worse. More recently, Twitter briefly removed the blue tick verification badge from the personal accounts of many Indian dignitaries, such as Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and several senior RSS functionaries, including its chief, Mohan Bhagwat.
Refuting all allegations against the Central government, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, said, “Twitter under Dorsey and his team committed repeated and continuous violations of Indian law. Matter-of-factly, they were in non-compliance with the law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022, and it was only in June 2022 that they finally complied. No one went to jail, nor was Twitter shut down.”
“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. India, as a sovereign nation, has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India. During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide that were fake,” added Chandrasekhar.
More often than not, Twitter has failed to act on requests filed by the Indian police and the Indian government to take down child pornography. Responding to Jack’s claims, Priyank Kanoongo, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, said, “During Jack Dorsey’s tenure, Twitter had become a den of paedophiles. Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM) were available in abundance. Dorsey is a criminal, and that is why he’s speaking against the judicial system.”
Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, confirmed the interference of the social media giant in the elections through its content moderation policies. Throughout the 2020 United States elections, Twitter unilaterally censored and shadow-banned the campaign tweets of former President Donald Trump, including suppressing and policing conservative voices. Just ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, Twitter heavily censored the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, but never restricted any similar news against Trump. In fact, suspending the then-ruling right-wing president Donald Trump seems nothing short of waging a war against the state.
The prognosis from the echo chambers of the Congress party and “liberal” voices claims subjugation of free speech and the ‘rise of fascism in India’ under the Modi government. However, the San Francisco-headquartered company was repeatedly and deliberately flouting India’s new IT rules, which required significant social media companies to establish a mechanism to address grievances and resolve complaints from users or victims. Consequently, the social media giant was ordered to comply with India’s new IT rules by the venerable Karnataka High Court when the former approached the latter opposing the IT laws.
It’s no surprise that Congress leaders have picked sides with an arrogant conglomerate that has been at loggerheads with the Indian government over failing to adhere to and subsequently disrespecting the law of the land in which the company operates while vehemently opposing tooth and nail another conglomerate just because it is Indian and not training its gun against the BJP. This surely kills irony a thousand times, if not more.
To quote evolutionary anthropologist Avi Tuschman: “If you are not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 30, you have no brain.” Jack Dorsey needs to comprehend this and reconcile with his age. He is no more in his 20s. He can’t be ignorant and arrogant in his public behaviour.
Yuvraj Pokharna is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets with @iyuvrajpokharna. Views expressed are personal.
Comments
0 comment