There is considerable hypocrisy in Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s charge against the Narendra Modi government. He accused the government of threatening the social media giant in 2020 and 2021 with a shutdown and raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests remove posts and restrict accounts it did not like.
It is true that the Modi government is not very tolerant of the views that hurt it politically. Twitter under Dorsey, however, didn’t do any better: it imposed censored not in self-interest but in genuflection to the intellectual and media elites more than once. It happened many times.
During the first year of the Covid pandemic, when Twitter, other Big Tech corporations, and major media organizations practically imposed the natural origin theory of the novel coronavirus on the world. This was the theory favored by the Chinese Communist Party, their lackey World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and a clique of unscrupulous scientists and experts; all of them played an egregious role in making Covid deadlier, if not transforming an epidemic into a pandemic in the first place.
In September 2020, Dorsay’s Twitter suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan’s account for having to courage to challenge the natural origin dogma; she claimed that the coronavirus was developed in a Wuhan laboratory. She reportedly fled China after whistleblowing.
She blamed Beijing for dismissing her and removing all relevant data. “They deleted all my information and also they told people to spread rumors about me,” she told the media.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese National Health Commission, the University Of Hong Kong, and China’s handmaiden, the WHO, reportedly disputed her claims.
And what did Dorsay, who is now shedding crocodile tears over the curtailment of free speech in India, do then? His Twitter de-platformed Li: “Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules.” The rules that were in consonance with the CCP’s interests.
Then there was the case of suppressing news on Hunter Biden’s laptop—the news that could have derailed father Joe Biden’s campaign. Those who did that accepted their culpability. A Reuters report on February 9 said, “Former Twitter executives told a Republican-led US House committee on Wednesday that they made a mistake by blocking tweets about a laptop said to belong to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter but said government officials were not involved.”
It further said, “At a combative day-long hearing before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, Republicans claimed that Twitter cooperated with government officials and the news media to suppress a New York Post article on the laptop’s contents, two weeks ahead of Biden’s 2020 election victory over former President Donald Trump, a Republican.”
The liberal-dominated mainstream media also suppressed the news of Hunter’s misdemeanors, but that’s another story.
Therefore, Dorsey championing the cause of free speech is like the devil citing scripture.