Call him proteus, loki, kitsune, or the ichchadhari naag. He is that mythical creature in every culture which glibly changes form. Sometimes, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey holds up a placard against ‘Brahminical patriarchy’, another time, he admits to his organisation’s deep Left bias, and as India enters the run-up to the 2024 general elections, he attacks the Narendra Modi government with lies and half-truths on freedom of speech.
“For example, India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers’ protests, around particular journalists who were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’, ‘we will raid the homes of your employees’, ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey has said in an interview.
Here is why Jack Dorsey is lying or speaking selective truth.
Under Dorsey, Twitter repeatedly violated Indian law under the amended provisions of the IT Act between 2020 and 2022, stating even in court that the nation’s legal framework must not apply to it. It started complying to a considerable extent finally in June 2022. Manish Maheshwari, who strutted across the globe as the MD of Twitter India, claimed he was not even part of Twitter when it came to accepting liability under Indian law. In spite of these transgressions, no Twitter India employee was raided or sent to jail, nor was Twitter shut down.
During his India visit, Jack Dorsey only met usual suspects from the Left ‘liberal’ establishment and even appeared in group photos with a placard decrying ‘Brahminical patriarchy’. He himself admitted to an entrenched pro-Left bias among Twitter employees.
Under him, Twitter’s top legal executive Vijaya Gadde admitted during a podcast to Twitter interfering with Indian elections. The platform arbitrarily ‘de-amplified’ and de-platformed nationalist voices in violating Articles 14 and 19 of the Indian Constitution. During the anti-CAA and anti-farm laws protests, it did not remove misinformation or block handles despite those being flagged. During the siege of Capitol Hill or the Canadian truckers’ protests, however, Twitter blocked thousands of handles. It even de-platformed the then President of the United States, Donald Trump, and suppressed an investigative story which exposed Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s corruption.
In his deposition to the US courts, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk stated that Twitter “disobeyed orders from and initiated risky litigation against the Indian government — thereby placing Twitter’s third largest market at risk.”
After Elon Musk took over, a series of exposé named ‘The Twitter Files’ showed how the social media platform under Jack was functioning as the FBI and CIA’s back office and one of the fronts of America’s Leftist Democratic establishment and the deep state.
If Jack Dorsey was working so closely with US spies, was he using Twitter as a foreign intel operation to interfere with India’s democratic process?
Predictably, India’s Opposition and anti-Modi ecosystem are busy quoting the same Jack Dorsey to discredit the nation’s democracy. At the forefront of the champions of free speech is Congress’s Kapil Sibal, who had brought the draconian Section 66A of the IT Act to throw anybody critical of the UPA government in jail.
Of all the creatures in Jack’s newly opened circus, irony remains the ringmaster.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.
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