Indian National Congress leader Rahul Gandhi wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Parag Aggarwal in December to inquire about the decrease of his followers and if it was due to the influence of the Indian government, reports Wall Street Journal.
“I want to bring your attention to what I believe is Twitter’s unwitting complicity in curbing free and fair speech in India… I have been reliably, albeit discreetly, informed by people at Twitter India that they are under immense pressure by the government to silence my voice,” wrote Gandhi.
“Since August, the average number of my new monthly Twitter followers has fallen to nearly zero. There is an inflection point after which my Twitter account seems to have been paralysed.”
Co-founder of AltNews, Mohammed Zubair, analysed the Twitter account of Rahul Gandhi and compared it with the Twitter accounts of Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah and Indian Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi. It revealed that followers of Gandhi dropped drastically whereas Shah and Modi gained more followers since September 2021.
Twitter also responded to Rahul Gandhi’s claims of restricting his followers, “Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate. 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.”
Twitter also highlighted that they do remove accounts that violate its community policies.
“We remove millions of accounts each week for violating our policies on platform manipulation and spam. You can take a look at our latest Twitter Transparency Center update for more context. While some accounts notice a minor difference, in certain cases the number could be higher,” Twitter said in response to Gandhi.
Last year, Twitter temporarily suspended the account of Rahul Gandhi on August 8, 2021, when he uploaded a photograph with the family of a nine-year-old Dalit rape victim, which was taken down by Twitter later.
