Spotlight
By Venkatesh Raghavan
Kangana was among the first to react in India
President Donald Trump’s tweets late last week got him a lifetime ban on his twitter handle. Twitter on its part clarified that Trump’s tweets after the Capitol episode amounted to glorification of violence in society. It may be taken as a sign of encouragement by different sets of audiences to take the law into their hands. The social media platform justified the ban stating post the rioting at Capitol on Thursday, Trump’s tweets seemed to be with the intent of precipitating further violence and unrest that could lead to a severe law and order breakdown in the country. Maintaining that the platform was all for expressing personal or political views freely, the Twitter management said, however, the line has to be drawn when the platform is made to cater to persons encouraging violence or unrest in any part of the world.
Trump reacted to this move by tweeting from the American President’s official Twitter handle, stating, “We won’t be silenced by such moves. We are well able to create our own platforms.” However, Twitter deleted Trump’s posts on the official handle of the American president. The Twitter management spelt it out stating, “Any person using an alternate handle to circumvent the ban on him or her vitiates against the ground rules set by our platform.”
At present, however, Twitter is not interested in banning or blocking any US official government handles. They iterated that the usage of these official handles will albeit get restricted. There were some very witty and some caustic quotes too alluding to the incident. Dave Brown said, “This is the first time that a sitting president has been banned from Twitter going back to 1812.” Another group of Caucasian Americans tweeted, “It took 4 years for Donald Trump’s twitter to get banned, it’s about damn time.”
The ban incident on Twitter took place related to his mentioning, “My voters have a giant voice” and subsequently stating, “I will not attend the inauguration.” Twitter management strongly felt that these messages are capable of inciting violence in wake of what happened at the Capitol on Thursday last.
Call it an irony of situation that from India, it was actress Kangana Ranaut, already in the eye of the storm for her rather acerbic tweets in recent times, was among the first to react, stating, “Don’t preach values when you don’t believe in them.” She summarised stating, “Twitter management was a tool in the hands of the Chinese and Islamist nations.”
Other reactions pouring in from Indian political parties had a different take on the incident. Dubbing it as a dangerous precedent, the BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya spelt it out that it smacks of intolerance to a differing view point. He also cautioned that the Big-tech companies that are posing as champions of free speech are ironically instrumental in throttling it. BJP Member of Parliament (MP) from the southern state of Karnataka, Tejasvi Surya warned the country of threats such unregulated big-tech companies unleash on democratic states. He dwelt on safeguarding the freedom of expression regardless of which political party that desires to voice its views on the twitter handle.
Contrastingly, Congress techie, Praveen Chakravarty warned that free speech cannot and should not be used as a guise to endanger or put at risk the lives of people living in society at large. Reacting to his thoughts on social media platforms in India, Chakravarty spelt out that in our country, WhatsApp is much more dangerous than Twitter, especially judging by the way it’s getting misused.
Why Indians should be worried about Uncle Donald and the Twitting Bird? Because it has a lot to do with the freedom of expression, democratic values, and of course the increasingly oligopolistic social media industry that can take on even the most powerful person on the planet — the POTUS – head-on.
