Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has accused the Indian government of putting pressure on the social media company to block accounts critical of the government amid the long-running farmers’ protest in 2021. Mr Dorsey, who was still the platform’s chief at the time before its takeover by Elon Musk, said India placed “many requests” during the months-long farmers protests. “India for example, India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government,” the former Twitter chief, who stepped down from the company’s board last year, said in a new interview with the YouTube channel Breaking Points. “It manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’… ‘we would 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,” Mr Dorsey said. The protests in 2021 forced the Indian government to repeal laws that would have seen the biggest reforms to Indian agriculture in decades. Farmers drove tractors from agrarian states surrounding Delhi to block traffic on major roads into the capital city. Amid the protests, the Indian government allegedly threatened to punish Twitter employees with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for failing to suspend accounts deemed critical of the Modi administration. It demanded that Twitter block over a thousand accounts, including those tweeting under the hashtag “ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide”, arguing that the phrase was inflammatory. Following this, the social media company made over 250 accounts inaccessible to its India-based users, including that of the investigative news magazine The Caravan. The move was later reversed after a major public outcry. Twitter told the Indian government at the time that it would not comply with the directive to ban some accounts and tweets as they either constituted “free speech” or were “newsworthy”. Mr Dorsey compared India’s behaviour to that of Turkey. “We had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their in their courts and often won but they threatened to shut us down constantly,” he said. Indian IT minister Rajeev Chandrashekar rejected the former Twitter chief’s claims that the Modi government put pressure on the social media company, calling it “an outright lie,” and “an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.” “Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in repeated [and] continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied,” Mr Chandrashekar said. The minister alleged that Twitter had a problem accepting the “sovereignty of India law,” and behaved “as if the laws of India did not apply to it”. “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’ ... India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India,” Mr Chandhrashekar said. “During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake,” the minister said, adding that the Indian government “was obligated to remove” them from the platform as it had the potential to “further inflame the situation based on fake news”. Mr Dorsey also commented on Twitter’s regime under Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, calling some of his moves “fairly reckless”. After taking over Twitter in October, Mr Musk proceeded to cut costs at the company and slash over three quarters of the firm’s workforce. “I think it set up a dynamic where he had to be very hasty, he had to be impatient, and he had to move as quickly as possible with features even if they weren’t fully thought out... It all looked fairly reckless,” Mr Dorsey said. Read More Twitter’s new chief echoes Elon Musk’s goal in first memo to employees Put ‘public good’ at heart of AI and new tech, Starmer to say Elon Musk is hilariously shut down by his ‘favourite’ podcast Bluesky, championed by Jack Dorsey, was supposed to be Twitter 2.0. Can it succeed? Jack Dorsey endorses Robert F Kennedy Jr for president Jack Dorsey says Twitter ‘went south’ after company’s sale to Elon Musk

TOKYO Toyota Motor Corp said on Wednesday that information on customers in some countries in Asia, excluding Japan,

Elon Musk has hired a 14-year-old “wonder kid” to work as a software engineer at SpaceX. Kairan Quazi will join the billionaire’s firm after graduating from Santa Clara University in California later this month, where he is set to receive a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and Engineering. The teenager has already completed an internship at Intel and will work on SpaceX’s Starlink team, which is building the world’s largest satellite internet network. “I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a software engineer on the Starlink engineering team,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. “One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.” His LinkedIn profile has since been removed as the business networking site requires users to be at least 16 years old. In an Instagram post responding to the ban, Quazi said his removal from the platform was “illogical, primitive nonsense” that amounted to discrimination. “I can be qualified enough to land one of the most coveted engineering jobs in the world but not qualified enough to have access to a professional social media platform?” he wrote. “LinkedIn showing everyone how regressive some tech company policies are.” A LinkedIn spokesperson told The Independent: “We appreciate his enthusiasm to join LinkedIn and applaud his incredible success, however we have an age limit in place of 16 years of age and that extends to all members.” Quazi will become the youngest graduate in the US college’s 172-year history, having jumped from third grade to the community college Las Positas College when he was just nine years old. Local media has described him as a genius and a “wonder kid” for his academic achievements, with IQ tests suggesting he is in the 99.9th percentile of the general population. “I think my college years have been the happiest years of my life because I had a lot of autonomy, really, to share my journey,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I think one of the things I really want to do with telling my story is hopefully have leaders in influential positions challenge their biases and misconceptions. Hopefully, I can open the door to more people like me.” Read More Man locked out of smart home for a week after delivery driver accuses him of being racist Twitter to be evicted from Colorado office Elon Musk to launch biggest ever rocket after dramatic failure Elon Musk eyes ‘highly habitable’ planet that’s ‘practically next door’

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