Popular microblogging site Twitter has assured the government cooperation after the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) complained about six accounts with objectionable content that impersonated the PMO’s official account.
The government had blocked six accounts after Twitter took no action. The social networking portal has assured the PMO that it would be finding the “unlawful content”, said reliable sources.
The microblogging site said it was “now actively reviewing” the request and will be seeking more information from the ministry of communications and information technology “to locate the unlawful content and the specific unlawful tweet”, they said.
Twitter also said that it could not take action earlier “because the government entity did not intimate through proper procedure electronically to our system and hence the request was not located”, said the sources.
“Twitter has agreed to cooperate in blocking the six fake PM accounts. and we welcome their cooperation. They responded to our complaint, saying we need to follow an internal channel to lodge a formal complaint in the matter,” the prime minister’s media adviser Pankaj Pachauri told IANS.
“We have forwarded their communication to the ministry of communications and IT for necessary action,” Pachauri said.
“We had earlier complained through email to the six fake twitter accounts individually,” he said.
According to Pachauri, a person behind one of the accounts PM0India wrote back saying he had changed the name of his twitter account to thehinduexpress, which proved that some people were up to some mischief on the social networking site.
The official said the fact that the government sought just six accounts out of 16 million to be blocked for misrepresenting the prime minister shows New Delhi did not favour a blanket ban on Twitter.
Some of the fake Twitter accounts misrepresenting the prime minister included @Indian_pm, @PMOIndiaa, @dryumyumsingh, @PM0India.
Officials said the source of these fake accounts could be outside the country.
Opening the prime minister’s Twitter account was Pachauri’s brainchild to reach out to the community through new media after he joined the PMO early this year.
Over the past few days, the government has also blocked around 300 websites which it blamed for spreading rumours that sparked an exodus of the northeast people from Bangalore and Chennai.