25 tweets per minute, efforts to defame Maha Vikas Aghadi: Congress

Solidifying claims of misuse of social media platforms to defame the Maha Vikas Aghadi government and the Mumbai Police, the Congress said that some of the Twitter handles were posting at the rate of 25 posts per minute.

The Mumbai Police has registered two FIRs into the alleged use of social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to defame the top cops and government functionaries.

A delegation of Congress comprising its state unit General Secretary and spokesperson Sachin Sawant, Dr Raju Waghmare, Ratnakar Singh called on Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh and handed over a memorandum.

“There is an unusual pattern in this, no ordinary user of Facebook or Twitter can post or tweet 40,000 posts in 3 months. Most of these Twitter handles seem to be tweeting at the rate of 25 tweets per minute. All these tweets are generally around the same topic which in this case was the Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR) case. Their hashtags are also common,” Sawant said.

According to him, some commercial agency was hired to tarnish the image of Maharashtra Police and state government.

"It also looks like the sole purpose of the campaign was to paint a picture that the Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is trying to save his son Aditya Thackeray and that is why the Mumbai Police is trying to suppress the case. And based on these fake tweets and posts, some of the agenda-driven news channels were also seen spreading propaganda. A video claiming that the person spoke to Sushant's soul went viral on a YouTube channel,” Sawant pointed out.

"This is an advanced version of the Goebbels technique and the BJP leaders are creating an artificial public opinion on it. It is a very serious and worrying precedent that they are setting," Sawant said.

The Congress had demanded that an SIT be set up to crack down on the social media racket and also to find out the real mastermind behind the BJP's new mode of terrorism.

Mumbai Police has also revealed that they are investigating 80,000 bogus accounts that are running a defamatory campaign.

"The University of Michigan has also reported that the BJP has a hand in the campaign. The Wall Street Journal had also exposed the alliance between Facebook and the BJP,” he said.

"The same modus operandi was used in the Delhi riots, during the killing of two sadhus in Palghar and could be used in the future to spread unrest in the society and to destabilize opposition governments, said Sawant.