American Hip-Hop Artist Unkonfined (stylized as ʋиκσиғιиɛ∂) on Wednesday tweeted in support of the farmers’ protests going on in India. However, he soon deleted his tweet, and clarified in a video that he deleted the tweet as he does not know much about the issue.
Unkonfined, who currently has more than 3,86,000 followers on social media platform Twitter, had simply tweeted “Support the farmers. #FarmersProtest”
This then led to a huge backlash from his Indian fanbase who soon unfollowed him. Here is a screenshot of the now-deleted tweet:
In his video explaining why he sent the tweet and then later deleted it, Unkonfined said that several people had been messaging him and had asked him to tweet with the hashtag ‘#FarmersProtest’. He decided to do it as he has a lot of followers in India. He further said that the deletion has nothing to do with supporting or not supporting the farmer protests. He said that he deleted the tweet because he does not know enough about the matter. “I deleted it because I don’t know enough about it to talk about,” Unkonfined said in his video. He further went on to say, “It’s important to educate yourself before you say anything and I should not have put a tweet out there that I don’t know anything about.”
THIS is an example of Real Maturity on SM! Appreciate @unkonfined 's honesty and candour. I completely agree that w/o knowing enough, Influencers ought not to opine about sensitive issues. And- if they realise they've been mistaken, they owe it to their fans to admit it! 👍🏻👏🏻💪🏻👌🏻 pic.twitter.com/SBSCyicMzT
— Jyoti Kapur Das (@jkd18) February 3, 2021
As reported earlier, some international celebrities like pop-star Rihanna, porn-star Mia Khalifa and radical climate activist Greta Thunberg have tweeted in support of the farmers’ protests against the Centre’s farm laws to build international pressure on India. Greta Thunberg had even posted a ‘toolkit’ allegedly prepared by the Poetic Justice Foundation to be used for this campaign, containing messages to be posted on social media, accounts of media houses, journalists and politicians to be followed etc. The celebrities had even tweeted the same messages contained in the toolkit from their Twitter handles.
Unkonfined further clarified on Twitter that he was not paid to tweet in support of the protests and nor was he part of a coordinated campaign. He admitted that he “simply fell victim to having good intentions”.
“I wanna be very clear here that I was in no way a part of a coordinated effort, was not presented a toolkit, and do not ever get paid to tweet. I simply fell victim to having good intentions but not knowing anything about the topic. It was wrong and I deleted it within minutes”, he tweeted.
I wanna be very clear here that I was in no way a part of a coordinated effort, was not presented a toolkit, and do not ever get paid to tweet. I simply fell victim to having good intentions but not knowing anything about the topic. It was wrong and I deleted it within minutes 🙏🏼
— ʋиκσиғιиɛ∂ (@unkonfined) February 5, 2021
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