Congress Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh on Tuesday praised Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for his "aggressive" stand against Twitter and said the latter must ensure falsities carried on the micro blogging site against the Congress and its leaders is also stopped.
In a letter to Prasad, the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister said "you have realised the need to enforce provisions of IT Act, which have been prevalent for quite some time" after Twitter took action against a BJP spokesperson in connection with an alleged fake post.
Singh, in his letter, mentioned that a Twitter handle called @leaksclubhouse was created on June 12 and it posted an edited audio clip of his conversation from a meet held on May 15.
The Clubhouse chat clip had created controversy as, in it, Singh can be purportedly heard saying that the Congress, if it came back to power, would have a "relook" on the revocation of Article 370 that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir. The same Twitter handle also defamed the Congress on June 17 by calling it an "anti-national" party and had asked people to leak "internal information" about it, Singh said in his letter to Prasad.
Singh said such acts by this Twitter handle was a violation of Section 72A, Section 43(a), (b) and (i) and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
"I request you to pass appropriate directions to investigate and prosecute the people responsible behind this in order to set a clear precedent for all social media platforms," Singh said.
He also urged the Union minister to direct social media platforms, including Twitter, to block all such accounts that are being used to defame people.