The Shiv Sena took a dig at the Centre in an editorial published in its mouthpiece Saamana on Monday, saying Twitter, which was once the soul of political campaign for the BJP, has now become a burden for the government at the Centre. The Modi government is considering whether to do away with the burden, it added.
The editorial claimed that except social media platforms like Twitter, most of the media in the country is under the control of the Union government.
Sena pointed out that the saffron party heavily depended on social media for the 2014 Parliament election campaign and had used various platforms for character assassination. The BJP was more active on social media then than on the ground, it stated.
The BJP used platforms like Twitter and Facebook for name calling and for tarnishing the image of politicians like Uddhav Thackeray, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar, Dr Manmohan Singh, the editorial claimed.
As the opposition too now has learnt to use Twitter effectively to take on the BJP, the party became unsettled. "As long as these attacks were happening from one side, the BJP was happy. But when the opposition began to launch attacks by using the social media platforms, panic gripped the BJP camp.
In West Bengal polls, Trinamool Congress' Mohua Moitra and Derek O'Brien took on the the BJP using Twitter. In the Bihar elections, Tejashwi Yadav exposed Modi and Nitish Kumar through Twitter," the editorial said.
Sena further pointed out that the Union government's mismanagement of the pandemic was exposed to the world through social media platforms.
Twitter and the government were at loggerheads over compliance of the new IT rules. The government had warned that failure to adhere to the norms will lead to the platform losing exemption from liability under the IT Act.
