The government has called Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey’s claims “outright lie” after he said at an interview on YouTube that the microblogging site was threatened with shutdown during farmers’ protest.
Dorsey revealed at the ‘Breaking Points’ news show that Twitter faced government pressures and was threatened with shutdowns in India, Nigeria and Turkey if it did not comply with orders to restrict accounts, with India wanting to curb journalists and protesters’ use of social media.
MoS for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Tuesday that Twitter was violating Indian laws “multiple times between 2020 and 2022. “During that entire period, nobody went to jail, and nobody was raided. Jack Dorsey knowing very well that Twitter did not comply with any law and didn’t face any consequence, is today lying and making stories about raids and arrests”, Chandrasekhar said.
This is not for the first time that Twitter has revealed “dark secrets” on social media. It has been unveiling what it calls the ‘Twitter Files’, which are documents meant for insight into what happened at the organisation before Elon Musk acquired the firm.
What was Twitter Files Part 1?
The part one of ‘Twitter Files’ was released on December 2, 2022 in which journalist Matt Taibii, who first gained access to the document, revealed that Democrats would send emails to the microblogging site with links of tweets that were against the interest of the party in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections, and Twitter would reply by saying “we’ll handle them”.
The exposé also revealed Twitter’s decision to censor the story around President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop. “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story” claimed, in a series of tweets, that the microblogging site took “extraordinary steps” to suppress the story on Joe Biden’s secret emails from Hunter’s laptop published by the New York Post in October 2020.
Twitter removed the links of the story from its platform and warned the users that the content may be “unsafe”. It even blocked sharing of links via direct messages using a tool “hitherto reserved for extreme cases such as child pornography”.
Taibii revealed that the decision was made at the higher levels of the company, and Dorsey was not involved. He alleged that Twitter’s former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadda had a key role in decision making.
What was Twitter Files Part 2?
The second tranche of docuseries, which was unveiled by another independent journalist, Bari Weiss, claimed that Twitter had a “secret blacklist”, before Musk took over the company, which it uses to censor voice of right-wing commentators.
Weiss, a former Wall Street Journal and New York Times writer, said Twitter employees build the blacklist to prevent disfavoured tweets from trending.
She also claimed that the teams at Twitter would reduce the visibility of entire right-wing accounts or trending topics without informing users.
Weiss posted on December 9, 2022, “Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist’, which prevented his tweets from trending.
In 2018, Gadda and Twitter’s head of product Kavyon Beykpour had reacted to the similar accusations, saying the company does not “shadow ban based on political views or ideology”.
Weiss said Twitter users call this “censor” a “Visibility Filter” (VF), which they used to block searches, limit discoverability and posts from appearing on trending pace and from inclusion in hashtags.
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