- Thursday, February 27, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
RAHUL GANDHI, former president of the Indian National Congress — the country’s main opposition party – has complained to social media giant Twitter about “strange” activity on his account and accused it of being the “unwitting” ally of the Narendra Modi government in curbing free speech.
The 51-year-old leader wrote to Twitter’s chief executive officer in a letter that growth in his new Twitter account followers stopped “suddenly” last August, plummeting from a monthly average of hundreds of thousands to almost nought.
“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,” he said in the letter dated December 27 and shared by his party on Thursday (27).
Gandhi said he believed that the US social media platform is part of an “unwitting complicity in curbing free and fair speech” but that the social media firm has an “enormous responsibility to ensure that Twitter does not actively help in the growth of authoritarianism in India”.
India’s Narendra Modi government has long been accused of suppressing dissent, including on social media, in the world’s largest democracy. It has denied the allegations.
This week, Twitter said India ranks fourth globally in the number of requests made by the government to remove content, after Japan, Russia and Turkey. The platform is banned in countries such as China and North Korea.
Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said social media suspensions during mass farmer protests in India last year was a “shocking case of blatant censorship”.
India also ranks among the prominent countries when it comes to shutting down the internet. Service was stopped for months across Kashmir in 2019 as part of a major security operation.
Last year, the Modi government introduced new social media rules that ask companies to remove and identify the “first originator” of posts deemed to undermine India’s sovereignty, state security and public order, AFP reported.
Social media companies and privacy activists have alleged that the vagueness of the rules mean they could be forced to go after authors of posts that criticise the government. They have challenged the rules in court.
On Thursday, a senior official of the grand-old party told AFP that Gandhi’s follower count “jumped by 100,000 within two days of Twitter’s response to his letter”.
A Twitter spokesperson told the news outlet that the number of followers on the platform fluctuated and it was linked to the removal of several thousands of accounts each week to deal with the platform’s manipulation and spam.
“While some accounts notice a minor difference, in certain cases the number could be higher,” the spokesperson said.
Modi has 75.1 million followers and is one of the most watched politicians on Twitter who regularly engages with his supporters through the platform.
Gandhi currently has 19.6 million followers.
