Social media companies can make any party win elections in India, says Rahul Gandhi

Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said that social media companies could make any political party win elections in India, PTI reported.

“Even if the EVM [electronic voting machine] is secure, Indian elections can be rigged through social media,” Gandhi claimed. “Systematic bias is being applied there and my social media handles are a live example of it.”

Gandhi made the remarks at a meeting with civil society members in Mumbai during the Maharashtra leg of his party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra.

In January, Gandhi had alleged that his followers had been limited on Twitter due to pressure from the Union government.

In a letter to former Twitter Chief Executive Office Parag Agrawal, Gandhi had said that his account, had 2 crore followers and was adding an average of 8,000 to 10,000 followers every day.

“Then something strange happened,” he wrote. “Since August 2021, the average number of my Twitter followers has fallen nearly to zero. There is an inflection point after which my Twitter account seems to have been paralysed.”

Gandhi had claimed that this happened after he tweeted about matters like the rape of a Dalit girl, the farmers’ protest and cases of human rights violations. In August last year, his account had also been locked for sharing a photo revealing the identity of the family of the Dalit girl who was raped. The account was restored a week later.

Gandhi had alleged that other Twitter handles, including those belonging to government offices, had tweeted the same photo but they had not been blocked.

At Wednesday’s interaction, without naming any political party, Gandhi said that communal violence has been planted in India as a strategic weapon to cause disharmony in society by one ideology and its leaders, reported The Indian Express.

“India at the moment is as per the vision of a powerful urban elite and it can only be smashed with the right way of thinking and it is our duty to refine that vision,” he said.