Indian government to Twitter: Stop offshoring and outsourcing – or risk losing legal protections India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has written to Twitter with a final warning after the micro-blogging service offshored and outsourced some of its obligations under the nation’s content takedown laws. The world’s second-most-populous nation and the micro-blogging service have been beefing over …
There are few things as pedantic or officious as an Indian civil servant. For sheer bureaucratic intolerance and dogged refusal to see anything that isn't exactly defined in law they take some beating.
Of course all of this can be easily resolved ... usually by application of green-backs.
Twitter should just pack up their shit and close up shop before returning to America. If India thinks their homebrew clone can do just as well then let them try. Meanwhile Twitter gives a cheery wave before firing their entire Indian workforce and going home. I wonder how well India's government would cope with having a few thousand "high tech" jobs suddenly flushing away? How well would they cope with a "high tech" employer refusing to hire any Indians? What kind of message does it send to the Indian populace if the general sentiment of "If your government wants to play hardball then we can just refuse to play with you anymore" starts rippling out to other corporations around the planet? I know it's unlikely and it's only a single company but imagine the political shitstorm if such an attitude suddenly made India no longer a desireable place to employ by anyone not already up to their necks in India...
Indeed, I was left wondering why Twitter didn't immediately resorted to the same old economic blackmail US companies have been deploying since IT began.
Well, OK, with the exception of Microsoft where the Gases Foundation would only help if the country would commit to waste a lot of its GDP on Microsoft products..
"a few thousand "high tech" jobs suddenly flushing away?"
I can't find any reference as to how many people Twitter employ in India. As of 2020, Twitter employed a total of 5,500 people. That doesn't really indicate that there are 1000's of high tech Twitter employees in India to be "let go". There may well be a few, but I suspect most Twitter employees in India will be phone drones and "checkers", neither of which are "high tech" or well paid.
I'd more likely believe that Twitter needs the huge market of India than India needs the relatively tiny number of jobs that Twitter brings.
Don't forget all those H1B recipients that Twitter likes to pull in for all those jobs no American can supposedly fill, or all those Indian-native-speaker "anti bullying" style folks they employ to keep tweeters from devolving into Indian racial/ethnic slurs, et al.
If Twitter decides to flush their entire Indian workforce over the actions of the Indian government then it might look bad on Twitter for having done so but it will *definitely* be bad for the Indian government as other (tech) companies reconsider their own interactions with the Indian citizenry due to said governmental interference.
"You can come work in India and enjoy our vibrant workforce but you'll have to accept us micromanaging your every move while here... Hey! Where are you going? Come back! We want to-" *door slam* "-welllll... fuck!"
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