NEW DELHI, Aug 14: A day after Rahul Gandhi accused the Twitter of interfering in India’s political process, his and the accounts of most other Congress leaders have been restored.
Rahul 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 Delhi.
Calling it a violation of the law, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights had complained to Twitter as well as the Delhi Police.
Handles of all those leaders who had shared the same picture as Gandhi, have also been unblocked. Lok Sabha member Manickam Tagore tweeted about the unblocking of his account.
On Friday, in a video statement, Gandhi had cautioned that taking sides in a political contest will have “repercussions” for Twitter.
“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,” Gandhi had alleged.
On Saturday, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who heads the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, said locking an account was an extreme step.
“Locking an account is an extreme step that infringes the freedom of expression of users. The rules can be upheld without such action. This may be a worldwide policy but I urge @Twitter to revise it forthwith. Its’ often selective application makes it worse. A rethink is overdue,” Tharoor said.
“In my conversations w/@Twitter I took strong exception to the policy of automatically locking accounts, whether @RahulGandhi’s or @rsprasad’s. If there is a violation of law, whether POSCO or copyright, it should suffice to withhold the offending tweet & issue notice to the user,” he added.
Twitter, in a statement, said, “As part of the appeal process, Rahul Gandhi submitted a copy of the formal consent/authorisation letter to use the referenced image via our India Grievance Channel. We have followed the necessary due diligence process to review the appeal and have updated our enforcement action based on the consent provided by the people depicted in the image. The Tweet is now withheld in India and the account access has been restored. As explained in our Country Withheld Policy, it may be necessary to withhold access to certain content in accordance with valid legal provisions under the Indian law(s).”
(Manas Dasgupta)