Leading industrialist Ratan Tata on Saturday said his Twitter account was hacked on Friday and a “spurious” tweet with “malicious intent” was sent.
“Shocked that my Twitter account was hacked yesterday (Friday) and a spurious malicious was wrongly attributed to me. This spurious tweet has now been deleted and my Twitter account restored. I regret the inconvenience that this malicious and wrongful action may have caused,” he tweeted.
On Friday, a tweet by parody account @realhistorypic was shared by Tata’s account showed Reliance Industries Chief Mukesh Ambani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi together with the caption: Owner of Network 18 welcoming his employee to address people how (sic) cronies are going to halt inflation.
The tweet also marked Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Netizens were surprised by the tweet by the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons considering that he is not very active on Twitter.
Tata’s previous tweets are dated September 1, February 21 and December 28, 2015. He has 6.13 million followers and has 119 tweets since he joined the microblogging platform in April 2011.
Ratan Tata, former Chairman of Tata Group, had posted a tweet in reply to the tweet posted by @RealHistoryPic, which poked fun at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s exclusive relationship with the Reliance owner Mukesh Ambani.
Tata’s blank tweet only had Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal tagged. This prompted the social media users to indulge in speculation game as many wondered if the veteran industrialist had indirectly taken a dig at Modi’s close proximity to Amabni.
Mukesh Ambani, while launching his Jio project, had announced that Jio users will never have to pay for voice calls while also announcing the ‘lowest in the world’ tariff for 4G mobile data.
This didn’t go down well with Ambani’s rivals in telecom sector as many of whom wrote to Modi seeking its intervention on the issue to “restore fair competition”.
It was in this context that many social media users could not resist their temptation to link Ratan Tata’s tweet to Reliance Jio’s impact on Tata’s telecom business.
Understandably, Rata Tata’s tweet, which has now been deleted, got shared widely with even Facebook users fervently posting this on their pages.
(With PTI inputs)