Rahul blames Twitter for curbing free speech in India

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has accused that Twitter has been "unwittingly complicit" in curbing free speech in India. In his letter to Twitter CEO Parag Aggarwal last month, he said,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. “The ideological battle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism across the world is being shaped on social media platforms. This places a huge responsibility on those that are at the helm of companies such as Twitter,” Gandhi added.

In his letter, Gandhi said that, since August, his average monthly followers fell to zero. “There is an inflection point after which my Twitter account seems to have been paralysed,” he said. “Perhaps not so coincidentally, it was in these same months that I raised the plight of a rape victim in Delhi. I have been reliably, albeit discreetly informed, by people at Twitter that they have been under immense pressure by the government to silence my voice.” He added that many other accounts, including government accounts, tweeted the same photograph but no action was taken against them.

Twitter, on the other hand, said that 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. It added: “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.”