NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders have demanded an apology from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government for allegedly taking actions and threatening to ban Twitter during the farmers’ movement against farm laws in Delhi.
The matter came to the fore after Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, stated in an interview that during the agitation against the farm laws by the farmers, the government raided the houses of Twitter officials and threatened to shut down the business if its request for information against journalists critical of the government was not met.
Reacting to the statement of Dorsey, AAP’s national convener and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said, “If an attempt was made to stop the farmer’s movement within the country, then it is a wrong thing.”
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AAP MP Sanjay stated that the central government tried to control the social media platform. “We’ve been saying since the beginning that the central government wants to control the institutions so that no information reaches the public through Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp. At least 750 farmers were martyred in the farmer’s movement, farmers were tortured,” Singh alleged.
He also demanded that the central government apologise to the nation for this.
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AAP RS MP Raghav Chadha stated that the revelations made by Twitter’s former CEO show how the BJP attempted to crush every voice of dissent in the country.
“The world sees us as a vibrant democracy, as the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar. It is a shame that the BJP’s actions are bringing a bad name to our country,” Chadha said in his tweet.
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In an interview, Dorsey, who sold Twitter to Tesla’s Elon Musk for $44 billion last year, said, “India, for example, is a country that had many requests from us regarding the farmers’ protest, particularly journalists critical of the government.”
“And 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’. We will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit. And this is India, a democratic country,” he scoffed.
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