By Sharon Thambala
Bengaluru, Feb 13 (IANS) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national social media and IT cell played no role in getting the party’s Karnataka Twitter account unblocked in one day, a source confirmed on Thursday.
“Nothing like that, no, no,” told a reliable source to IANS, confirming that twitter did not unblock BJP Karnataka on the party’s national social media and IT cell’s approach.
According to the source, Twitter blocked BJP Karnataka because it violated the global social media giant’s rules and policies.
“If you go through BJP Karnataka twitter timeline, you will see there is a notice which says this tweet is no longer available because it was actioned for violation of twitter rules and policies, so hence the action,” the source said.
Confirming the source, a notice is on display from Twitter on BJP Karnataka account’s timeline on February 10 saying, “This tweet is no longer available because it violated the twitter rules. Learn more.”
Clicking the link lead to a twitter engagement rules page which outlines the micro-blogging site’s policies and general guidelines.
“Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation. Violence, harassment and other similar types of behaviour discourage people from expressing themselves, and ultimately diminish the value of global public conversation. Our rules are to ensure all people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely,” said Twitter about rules of engagement.
The American company individually addressed a list of topics, and cautioned the account holders how not to abuse the platform.
The topics included violence, terrorism and violent extremism, child sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment, hateful conduct, suicide or self-harm, sensitive media and illegal or certain regulated goods or services.
Elaborating on violence, Twitter said, “You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence.”
On hateful conduct, Twitter said, “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
On Wednesday, Vinod Krishna Murthy, Karnataka state BJP Yuva Morcha Vice President told IANS that the state party social media and IT cell approached the BJP national social media and IT cell based in Delhi for getting its twitter account unblocked.
“We got our twitter account unblocked with the help of BJP’s national social media and IT team based in Delhi,” told Murthy yesterday, which the source contradicted as false to IANS.
According to Murthy, BJP Karnataka IT cell fired a series of tweets in the past couple of days, which were deleted by twitter.
Not only it deleted the tweets, it also blocked BJP Karnataka’s official handle for 24 hours on Tuesday, owing to the account’s ‘views on liberals’.
However, after getting unblocked on Wednesday, BJP Karnataka fired another tweet vowing that it will not step back.
“We will not step back in our efforts to bring out the truth in the public domain,” tweeted BJP Karnataka.
Murthy said the Karnataka BJP IT cell has been telling the world what the liberals, leftists and Congress have done and commenting about why the liberals are going against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which was not openly talked about.
He asked for fair play for everybody on a platform like Twitter.
(Sharon Thambala can be contacted at [email protected])
–IANS
sth/rt