In a major revelation on Twitter’s transparency, co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has alleged that the Indian government pressurized on the social media platform to block accounts related to the 2021 farmers’ protests and criticism of the government.
In an interview he gave to the YouTube channel Breaking Points, Dorsey claimed that India threatened to shut down Twitter and conduct raids on employees’ homes if their demands were not met.
In a quick but expected reaction, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship of India, refuted Jack Dorsey’s claim of India threatening to shut down Twitter, terming it an ‘outright lie’
These revelations by Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s transparency and political pressures come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi repealed three contentious farm laws in November 2021.
According to Dorsey, Twitter received multiple requests from India urging the platform to block accounts associated with the Farmers’ Protests and journalists who were critical of the government.
He stated that the Indian government employed various tactics to influence Twitter transparency, including threats to shut down Twitter operations in India, conduct raids on employees’ homes, and even close down Twitter offices if the platform did not comply.
Dorsey emphasized that such actions on Twitter transparency were unexpected from a country with democratic values like India.
Dorsey also highlighted that Turkey exhibited similar behavior, pressuring Twitter to comply with its demands and threatening to shut down the platform. Twitter has been involved in legal battles with the Turkish government but has consistently emerged victorious.
“Twitter received over 16,000 government information requests for user data from over 85 countries during the reporting period (H1 2022),” said the Twitter blog post on April 25.
“Disclosure rates vary by requester country. The top five requesting countries seeking account information in H1 2022 were India, the United States, France, Japan, and Germany.”
Dorsey’s disclosure comes hot on the heels of a controversy in India, where the PII of literally everyone who took COVID vaccine was put on sale.
Twitter transparency and India: Changing norms
Twitter transparency norms have apparently changed considerably since then.
In recent months, Twitter largely complied with requests from the Indian government to remove accounts, including those of journalists during the search for pro-Khalistani preacher Amritpal Singh.
Additionally, Twitter took down tweets featuring the BBC documentary series “India: The Modi Question” upon demand from the Indian Ministry of Information & Broadcasting.
The Twitter transparency policy too underwent a significant change, as the platform announced on April 25 that it would not publish a formal transparency report for the year 2022.
It remains unclear whether these changes in Twitter transparency are connected to the ownership transition since being acquired by billionaire Elon Musk.
However, Twitter maintains that it continues to take action on content that violates its rules and protects users’ rights in response to government legal requests.
India holds the distinction of being the world’s highest requester of user account data, surpassing Twitter’s two largest markets, the United States and Japan.
The exact number of user account requests made by the Indian government to Twitter remains unknown, as the company no longer provides routine breakdowns.
During the period of July to December 2021, when India was the top requester, Twitter received 2,211 requests pertaining to 7,768 accounts.
Bots, breaches, and Twitter transparency
Twitter was in the cybersecurity news recently when researchers found the personal information of 400 million Twitter users being offered for sale on the dark web.
This revelation came shortly after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) initiated an investigation into a previous data leak on Twitter, which affected over 5.4 million users. The initial breach was discovered in November 2022.
According to Alon Gal, the co-Founder and CTO of Hudson Rock, an Israeli cybercrime intelligence company, it is believed that the data was acquired through a vulnerability in Twitter’s API, allowing the attacker to access any email or phone number and retrieve corresponding Twitter profiles.
Gal stated in his LinkedIn post that the threat actor shared a valid sample of 1,000 notable accounts, which included the private information of individuals such as AOC, Brian Krebs, Vitalik Buterin, Kevin O’Leary, Donald Trump Jr., and many others.
The social media platform is currently waging a war against bots, essentially pieces of software that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API.
Twitter’s guidelines permit the presence of “non-abusive bots” on the platform. These bots can be developed for harmless hobbies, artistic endeavors, or to share useful information. However, “useful information” has turned out to be a leeway to propagate unverified data.