Twitter Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Elon Musk, has said that it is not possible to uphold the freedom of speech in India or else the twitter employees will go to jail.
Responding to a BBC journalist’s question, the Twitter CEO said, he did not know “what exactly happened” when Twitter took down content related to a documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year.
In January, India ordered the blocking of a BBC documentary which exposed Narendra Modi’s role in the anti-Muslim riots in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, saying that even sharing of any clips via social media was barred.
The government had issued orders to Twitter to block over 50 tweets linking to the video of the documentary, Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the Modi government, had said. While the BBC had not aired the documentary in India, the video was uploaded on some YouTube channels, she had said.
Elon Musk in an interview with the BBC broad-cast live on Twitter Spaces, when asked if the site took down some content at the behest of the Indian government said, “I am not aware of this particular situation… don’t know what exactly happened with some content situation in India.”
“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can’t go beyond the laws of the country,” he said.
“If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws…” Elon Musk said.
India’s regulatory scrutiny of various US tech firms such as Twitter, Facebook’s WhatsApp and Amazon.com Inc, has hurt the business environment in India, prompting some companies to rethink ex-pansion plans, Reuters has reported.—KMS
