As India flagged the blue tick removal from the personal account of M Venkaiah Naidu, Twitter said it was done due to a long gap in login.
Twitter on Saturday restored the blue verification tick of vice president M Venkaiah Naidu's personal account, within hours of removing it from his profile. The corrective action by the social media giant came after the removal of the verification tick triggered a major uproar on social media.
Officials of the Vice President Secretariat said the personal Twitter handle of Naidu @MVenkaiahNaidu was inactive for a long time and the Twitter algorithm removed the blue badge. The last tweet posted from the personal handle was on July 23 last year.
Naidu’s Twitter handle — @MVenkaiahNaidu — has 1.3 million followers. The last tweet from his account was on July 23, 2020, which shows the vice-president is not active on his personal account since then.
Naidu is, however, active from his official handle of Vice President of India — @VPSecretariat — which continues to have a blue badge. It has 931.3k followers.
Sources say that the Vice President's Office raised a concern with Twitter India and they were told that the move was not deliberate and since the Vice President hadn’t logged into his personal account since July last year, the account automatically lost its verified status due to inactivity.
However, several social media users pointed out how several accounts which are inactive continue to have the blue tick. Saturday also saw verification badge from personal Twitter handles of several Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) removed.
This episode comes at a time when the San Francisco-headquartered Twitter has been engaged in a face-off with the central government over the new IT Rules, which were announced on February 25. The Union ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has warned Twitter to comply with the "law of the land."
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