MoS Chandrasekhar reacts to viral video of Twitter employee claiming platform is biased

Chennai: Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar responded to a viral video of an alleged Twitter engineer claiming that the platform had a strong left-wing bias and that right-wingers were often censored. Chandrasekhar called this “deeply troubling” and said that these incidents raise concerns about having an open and accountable internet.

Sharing a clip of the video, Chandrasekhar said that internet intermediaries and platforms enjoy safe harbour under Section 79 of IT Act as they are supposed to be unbiased in their algorithms also. “Revelations like this raise many concerns for us vis-à-vis an open, safe and trusted, accountable internet,” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.

The person in question who was identified as Twitter engineer Siru Murugesan in the video that was leaked by Project . He said that the culture at Twitter is extremely far left and one that does not believe in free speech and would censor conservative or right-wing opinions.

“Ideologically, it does not make sense, because we’re actually censoring the right, and not the left,” he said while being secretly recorded. “So, everyone on the right wing will be like, ‘bro, it’s okay to stay, just gotta tolerate it.’ ‘The left will be like, no, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform. It does that on the right. It’s true. There is bias. It is what it is today.”

Murugesan went on to claim that his colleagues “hate” the proposed takeover by the Tesla CEO Elon Musk as he is viewed as being someone whose companies run in contrast to Twitter’s “socialist” workplace. “He’s a capitalist and we weren’t really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist,” he added. Murugesan also said a lot has changed since Musk’s announced takeover and that employees were worried about their jobs.

Twitter on its part has not put out any official statement or reacted on the veracity of the video.

This is not the first time that Chandrasekhar has commented on Twitter. Last week, he tweeted that deplatforming is “a violation of fundamental rights of users” in the context of Twitter’s decision to remove former US President Donald Trump from the microblogging platform.

“Deplatforming is a big deal – It’s a violation of fundamental rights of users and must have force of law behind it for any platform to exercise and must never ever be done arbitrarily,” Chandrasekhar had tweeted on Wednesday.

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