Congress MP Rahul Gandhi recently wrote a letter to the Twitter CEO Parag Aggarwal, telling him that he was informed discretely by Twitter employees from India, that they were under immense pressure to silence his voice. This letter comes after Rahul Gandhi saw a tremendous drop in his follower count on Twitter. However, in response to the letter, the social media site has said that it has zero tolerance towards manipulation and spam.
In his letter, Rahul Gandhi had included an analysis of Twitter accounts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor. He said while his followers increased by 4 lakh on average for the first seven months of 2021, the growth had come to a halt after his account was suspended for eight days in August last year.
“Perhaps not so coincidentally, it was precisely during these months that I raised the plight of a rape victim’s family in Delhi, stood in solidarity with farmers and fought the government on many other human rights issues. In fact, a video of mine that promised farmers that the 3 infamous farm laws will be repealed is among the most watched video on Twitter posted by any political leader in India in recent times,” Rahul Gandhi wrote.
Responding to this letter, a Twitter spokesperson has now said, “Twitter has a zero-tolerance approach to platform manipulation and spam. We fight spam and malicious automation strategically and at scale with machine learning tools, and as part of those consistent and ongoing efforts to ensure a healthy service and credible accounts, follower counts can and do fluctuate.”
In addition, news agency ANI had reported that the spokesperson also said, “Follower counts are visible features and we want everyone to have confidence that numbers are meaningful and accurate. We remove millions of accounts each week for violating our policies on platform manipulation and spam.”
Following this, pointing to the defections that Congress is seeing, BJP’s Amit Malviya said at a time when the party is facing rebellion in Uttarakhand, Punjab, Rahul Gandhi is worried about his Twitter followers. And replying to this tweet, former IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “May be large number of leaders who are leaving Congress, their followers are now unfollowing Rahul Gandhi.”
May be large number of leaders who are leaving Congress, their followers are now unfollowing Rahul Gandhi! 😀 https://t.co/YZi05qsTLM
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) January 27, 2022
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