Twitter on Saturday removed the verified status of several accounts held by senior RSS leaders including the Hindutva organisation’s chief, Mohan Bhagwat. Other leaders, whose accounts lost the blue tick included Suresh Soni, Arun Kumar, Suresh Joshi and Krishna Kumar among others.
It’s believed that Twitter chose to remove the verified status of accounts held by senior RSS functionaries because of a prolonged period of inactivity. It was for the same reason that the microblogging site also dropped the blue tick of Vice President Venkaiah Naidu before restoring his verified status.
Naidu had not posted any tweets since July 2020.
Meanwhile, the social media giant’s action is bound to anger the BJP-led government. The government is also understood to have taken a dim view of Twitter removing the blue tick of Naidu, who was a veteran BJP leader before being appointed to a constitutional post.
Bhagwat has in excess of two lakh followers but he has not posted a single tweet since opening his account in May 2019. Joshi, who too opened his account in 2019, has not posted a single tweet.