NEW YORK: Twitter chief Elon Musk on Wednesday said the social media platform has no choice but to follow the local laws in any given country or risk being shut down.
Musk's comments came in response to questions regarding Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's allegations that the Indian government had threatened the social networking platform with raids if it did not take down critical content during the farmers' protests against the three farm laws.
"Twitter doesn't have a choice but to obey local governments. If we don't obey local government laws then we will get shut down," he told reporters after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New York.
"The best we can do is to follow the laws in any given country," adding that it is impossible for "us to do more than that".
Musk said there were different rules and regulations for different forms of governments, and "we will do our best to provide the freest speech that is possible under the law".
"One cannot just apply America to the earth," Musk said.
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In a recent interview, Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, claimed that during his tenure as CEO, Twitter received requests from the Indian government to block accounts covering the 2020-2021 farmers' protests and those critical of the government.
"It manifested in ways such as: 'We will shut Twitter down in India', which is a very large market for us; 'We will raid the homes of your employees', which they did; and this is India, a democratic country," Dorsey said.
Minister of State for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar had termed Dorsey's claims as an "outright lie".
Chandrasekhar said Dorsey's Twitter regime "had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law".
"It (Twitter) behaved as if laws of India did not apply to it," Chandrasekhar said.