Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has written to Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal stating that the microblogging app is limiting the growth in his Twitter followers due to pressure from the Centre. 

Last year, Rahul Gandhi’s account was locked for eight days after he tweeted about meeting the family members and photos of the parents of the Dalit rape victim, which was against the law of revealing the identity of the rape victim. But later, the account was restored after receiving a consent letter from the victim’s family. 

News Agency ANI has tweeted Rahul Gandhi’s letter. In the letter, Rahul Gandhi has written to CEO Parag Agarwal, stating that “I want to bring your attention to what I believe is Twitter’s unwitting complicity in curbing free and fair speech in India”. 

In the letter, he further added, “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.”

In the letter, Rahul Gandhi has also added an analysis stating that his followers have barely increased since August 2021. Currently, he has 19.6 million followers on Twitter. He further added that in these months, he raised his voice for a Dalit rape victim, stood with the solidarity of farmers, and fought the government on many other human rights issues. 

“You have an enormous responsibility to ensure that Twitter does not actively help in the growth of authoritarianism in India”, Rahul Gandhi wrote in his letter.

A Twitter spokesperson told ANI that, “Twitter has a zero-tolerance approach to platform manipulation and spam”. Further, “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”, the Twitter spokesperson told ANI.

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