After Ravi Shankar Prasad, Shashi Tharoor Says His Twitter Account 'Blocked' Temporarily
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New Delhi: Hours after Minister for Electronics & Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad was today reportedly denied access to his own Twitter account temporarily, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said his account had faced similar action.
Tharoor said that, unlike Prasad’s case, he was blocked from his Twitter account for a copyright violation over a video he had posted of a dance performance featured the song ‘Rasputin’.In this case, the complainant was the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (@IFPI_org) which is zealously defending the rights of@sonymusic to “Rasputin". Ironically, at their last conference in India, I was a keynote speaker! #SMH," he tweeted cheekily adding that he “didn’t blame Twitter for the action or attribute the motives to them that @rsprasad (Ravi Shankar Prasad) does, though it wasn’t pleasant finding my account locked. Clearly, they had no choice but to honour a DMCA takedown notice, however stupid & pointless the request was."Tharoor added that as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, he will seek an explanation from the microblogging site for their action against his and Prasad’s accounts. Earlier, Prasad said he was denied access to his own account for almost an hour. Though the Twitter account of the Minister was visible for public viewing, Twitter did not permit anyone authorized to access this account to log in or make any post, they added. Twitter and the government have been at loggerheads over multiple instances in the past months, including during the farmers’ protest and later when the microblogging platform tagged political posts of several leaders of the ruling party BJP as “manipulated media", triggering a sharp rebuke from the Centre.
