The Opposition party MPs are scheduled to bring up the issue at the Thursday meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Communication and Information Technology (IT) amid the political battle over former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s allegation that the Indian Government threatened to shut down the microblogging site’s operations in India. We will raise the recent statement of the former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey’s allegation in which the Government of India threatened to block Twitter during the farmer protests in the country. We would seek a response from the official attending the meeting today on behalf of the government,” an opposition party MP told ANI. The MP further said, “Opposition MPs want the chairman to allow the issue concerned with Dorsey’s “pressure” remark to be raised in the meeting and the government to respond to it.”
A parliamentary standing committee is scheduled to meet today under the chairmanship of Shiv Sena (Shinde faction) Lok Sabha MP Jadhav Prataprao Ganpatrao. The parliamentary panel has been called to discuss citizen data security and privacy.
“Evidence of the representatives of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on the subject ‘Citizens’ data security and privacy”, Committee agenda read.
The committee has total of 31 members from different parties including both houses (Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha). Earlier, the former Twitter CEO in an interview aired on the YouTube channel alleged that the Indian government threatened to shut down the microblogging portal.
“India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers’ protests, around particular journalists who were critical of the government and it manifested in ways such as we will shut Twitter down in India, India is a big marketplace for us.