Twitter tells Rahul Gandhi it has ‘zero-tolerance’ towards manipulation, spam

Exactly a month after senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi complained to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal that the number of his Twitter followers is declining, the microblogging site on Thursday (January 27) wrote back giving reasons why the follower count could fluctuate.

A Twitter spokesperson told ANI: “We fight spam and malicious automation strategically and at scale with machine learning tools, and as part of those consistent and ongoing efforts to ensure a healthy service and credible accounts, follower counts can and do fluctuate.”

The spokesperson further said: “Twitter has a zero-tolerance approach to platform manipulation and spam.”

Gandhi had written to Agrawal on December 27 last year, alleging that Twitter was “perhaps unwittingly complicit in curbing free and fair speech in India”. The Congress leader cited data from his Twitter account (collated since the eight-day suspension of his account in August last year), comparing it with that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and fellow Congressman Shashi Tharoor. Gandhi said that while he was adding about 4 lakh followers on average till July 2021, the growth stopped since the suspension of his account in August.

“For example, in May 2021, my account gained roughly 640,000 new followers. This had been the case for several years until July 2021. Then something strange happened. Since August 2021, the average number of my new monthly Twitter followers has fallen to nearly zero. There is an inflection point after which my Twitter account seems to have been paralysed,” the Congress leader wrote.

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Gandhi also told Agrawal that he expects Twitter will not become a “pawn in the destruction of the idea of India”, adding that the microblogging site has an “enormous responsibility to ensure that it does not actively help in the growth of authoritarianism in India.”

The Congress leader had said that Twitter is an important platform for people to raise their voices and question the government.

Twitter responded stating that the company removed millions of accounts each week for violating its norms on manipulation and spam.