Twitter on Saturday unlocks the official handles of the Indian National Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi, day after the latter lashed out on Twitter for locking his and his party’s official accounts and termed the micro-blogging site ‘biased’, ‘which only listens to the government’.
Shortly after the Twitter handle of Congress was unlocked, the grand old party tweeted ‘Satyameva Jayate’, to mark its comeback.
Gandhi’s account was temporarily suspended last week after he tweeted pictures of the family of a nine-year-old victim of alleged rape and murder in Northwest Delhi. Twitter deemed it a violation of its rules.
In response, the former Congress chief had, yesterday, accused Twitter of “interfering in the national political process” and said shutting down of his handle amounted to an “attack on the country’s democratic structure”.
Mr Gandhi, in a YouTube video statement titled “Twitter’s dangerous game”, alleged that the microblogging site was not a neutral and objective platform and was “beholden to the government”.
Questioning Twitter’s locking of his handle, he said millions of his followers were unfairly denied the right to an opinion.
“It’s obvious now that Twitter is actually not a neutral, objective platform. It is a biased platform. It’s something that listens to what the government of the day says,” he alleged.
In the wake of the friction with the Congress, Twitter has transferred its India head Manish Maheshwari, against whom an FIR was registered in Uttar Pradesh in connection with a probe related to a video of an alleged hate crime, to the US.
While the company did not specify any reason for the change, it said Maheshwari will move to the US as Senior Director (Revenue Strategy and Operations) and focus on new markets in his new role.