After Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey reiterated that the platform received “many requests” from the Indian government to block accounts covering farmers’ protests and those critical of the government, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said that he is “appalled by the revelations about how Mr. Ashwini Vaishnaw runs his ministries”.
Ashwini Vaishnaw is the Union Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics and Information Technology.
Chidambaram took to Twitter and said, “First, the Balasore tragedy. Obviously, the minister or his officers did not read the CAG Reports Nos. 22 and 23 submitted in December 2022 or the letter of the Principal Chief Operations Manager in February 2023.”
Also Read: India threatened to shut down Twitter, raid employee homes during farmers’ protest: Jack Dorsey
“The massive leak of data from CoWin Portal exposed the claim that personal data of millions of Indians are safe and protected,” he added on Twitter.
The personal details of citizens uploaded on the CoWIN portal after their vaccination were available and freely accessible on Telegram app for some time, some media reports had recently claimed.
Commenting on the controversy triggered following Dorsey’s claims, Chidambaram said, “The revelation that enormous pressure was put on Twitter to block or delete tweets/accounts and the threats to unleash the Income Tax department and arrest employees demolished the claim that the investigating agencies are independent.”
Opposition slams Centre
Opposition parties and farmer leaders on Tuesday accused the Centre of suppressing the voices of the people and murdering democratic values after former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey claimed he was under pressure from the government to remove accounts of those covering the farmers’ protests.
Parties including the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Shiv Sena (UBT) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and farmer leaders slammed the Centre and said that there was a “systematic erosion” of freedom of speech and expression since the BJP came to power in 2014.
Congress MP Manish Tewari said, “What Jack Dorsey has said is not surprising at all. In the past nine years, after 2014, there has been a systematic erosion of freedom of speech and expression and civil liberties in the country. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not confined to the central government alone.”
The Congress tweeted a picture of the Twitter bird being throttled and captioned the post saying, “A dictator is a coward.”
Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, claimed that the Indian government “pressured” the company with threats of a shutdown and raids on employees if it did not comply with requests to take down posts and restrict accounts that were critical of the government over the protest by farmers against the now-scrapped farm laws in 2020 and 2021.
He made the allegation in an interview with the YouTube news show Breaking Points on Monday.
‘Outright lie’
Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday strongly refuted former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s claim the social media platform came under pressure from the Indian government during the farmers’ protest.
Taking to Twitter to deny Dorsey’s charge, Chandrasekhar said, “This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history (sic).”
Also Read: ‘Outright Lie’: Centre slams Jack Dorsey’s claim that India threatened to shut down Twitter