New Minister of State for IT briefly loses Twitter blue tick, restored later

New Delhi | Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar lost the “blue tick” badge from his Twitter profile for a brief period on Monday.

The verification badge was, however, restored later.

Experts suggest the removal of the blue tick was due to the change in user name effected by Chandrashekhar after he took over as a Minister of State.

He has changed his Twitter user name to @Rajeev_GoI from @rajeev_mp.

The Rajya Sabha MP for Karnataka was appointed the Minister of State for IT after the latest reshuffle of the Council of Ministers last week. Ashwini Vaishnaw, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Odisha is the new Minister for Electronics and IT.

The loss of blue tick initially created confusion among several social media users as it was perceived to be a voluntary and abrupt action from Twitter’s end. However, Twitter’s policy clearly states that changing the username would result in losing the badge by users.

Apprehensions were fuelled as amid the tussle between Twitter and the Union government over the new IT rules, last month, the then IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was denied access to his Twitter account for almost an hour over alleged violation of the US’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Although, he was subsequently allowed to access the account, taking to India-made micro-blogging platform Koo, Prasad had called the action by the Twitter as “a gross violation of the IT guidelines”.

A Twitter spokesperson had then confirmed that it had temporarily restricted access to Prasad’s Twitter account due to a DMCA notice, and said that the company responds to valid copyright complaints.

The US-headquartered micro-blogging platform was seen to be in loggerheads with the Indian government over the new IT rules, although eventually it has largely complied to the norms. As required under the norms, it has filed its first grievance redressal report, wherein the company said that it has suspended 22,564 accounts for “child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity” and “promotion of terrorism”.

Further, Twitter has also appointed Vinay Prakash as its Resident Grievance Officer (RGO) for the country.

IANS

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