Hope you act against hate speech: Rahul to Musk

Congrats @elonmusk.

I hope @Twitter will now act against hate speech, fact check more robustly, and will no longer stifle the opposition’s voice in India due to government pressure. pic.twitter.com/j2unZeYYj6

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) October 28, 2022

Gandhi also shared a graph of what he called “manipulation” of his Twitter account in terms of his follower count. The graph claimed that his follower count did not increase — in his words “new followers” were “suppressed” — between August 2021 and February 2022. Gandhi claimed he had made 20 appeals to Twitter but the social media giant denied any wrongdoing.

Gandhi’s Twitter account was “temporarily” suspended on August 8, 2021, a day after he posted a picture of him with the family of a nine-year-old Dalit girl who died after allegedly being raped in Delhi. His tweet said: “Tears of the parents are saying only one thing — their daughter, the daughter of this country, deserves justice. And I am with them on this path to justice.”

A message from Twitter read that the tweet had violated its rules. The action had come after the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights issued a notice to Twitter India, asking the social media platform to remove the tweet which reveals the identity of rape victim.

In December 2021, Rahul had written to the platform’s then CEO Parag Agrawal, claiming that his follower count on the platform has not increased since his account was temporarily suspended in August. And he alleged that Twitter is perhaps unwittingly complicit in “curbing free and fair speech” in India.

Gandhi, in a letter dated December 27, 2021, asked Twitter not to become a “pawn in the destruction of the idea of India”, arguing that it has an “enormous responsibility to ensure that it does not actively help in the growth of authoritarianism in India”.

Asserting that the ideological battle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism across the world is being shaped on social media platforms, he had said: “This places a huge responsibility on those that are at the helm of companies such as Twitter… I want to bring your attention to what I believe is Twitter’s unwitting complicity in curbing free and fair speech in India.”

“There is an ongoing assault on India’s institutional framework and a complete capture of traditional mainstream media” which has been “discussed extensively both in India and abroad… Hence, social media platforms like Twitter have become an important channel to raise people’s issues and hold the Government to account. In this backdrop, it is perplexing that the growth in my Twitter followers has suddenly been suppressed. With nearly 20 million followers, my Twitter account has been very active, adding an average of eight to ten thousand new followers every day,” he had claimed. “For example, in May 2021, my account gained roughly 640,000 new followers. This had been the case for several years until July 2021. Then something strange happened. Since August 2021, 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,” the former Congress president had written.

Gandhi had also attached analysis by “social media experts.”

He had said it was during that time he had “raised the plight of a rape victim’s family in Delhi, stood in solidarity with farmers and fought the government on many other human rights issues”.

“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. My account was even blocked for a few days for no legitimate reason. There were many other Twitter handles, including government ones, which had tweeted similar photos of the same people. None of these accounts were blocked. My account was singularly targeted,” he had said.