GUWAHATI: In an incident that surprised everyone, BJP ministers more so than anyone else, a number of coordinated tweets from BJP Ministers’ and state party accounts were posted that were antonymous of what they were trying to say.
Among these accounts was the official Twitter account of BJP Assam Pradesh (@BJP4Assam) that was also a victim of this error. Their account tweeted that the “Modi govt has not made inclusive development as the focal point of its functioning. This is New India where the welfare of each individual is not the priority.”
Before the reasoning for this was clear, people had assumed that these twitter handles were hacked, or had gone rogue.
However, the error with these tweets was noticed by Pratik Sinha, known for his work of his fact-checking website, Alt News on February 13 when he tweeted a video of how people can edit public Google document that the BJP’s IT personnel gives to its social media teams. This document can be edited online and provides a list of agendas that have to be tweeted for the day to promote the BJP’s agenda.
How do you get a Union Minister to tweet what you want? Well, you go and edit the trending document made by BJP IT cell, and then you control what they tweet. Thread.
— Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) February 13, 2019
Here's the video of this morning when their trending document got automagically updated :-)
1/n pic.twitter.com/6DLwDPg2CV
This video shows how the positive aspect of a comment/statement has been changed to a negative aspect. He shows us how this document was then used by the social media team of the BJP government to post the tweets.
In another tweet, the editor of the fact-checking website said that while this might seem like a laughing matter, it is not as it shows that “a non-government entity is sitting in BJP’s office and is controlling what a Union Minister is tweeting.”
