Geotag issue: Twitter's clarification on Leh being showed in China

A day after it showed Leh, the capital of the Union Territory of Ladakh in India, as a part of the territory of China, Twitter called it a ‘geotag issue’ and said on Monday that its team had worked swiftly to investigate and set the glitch right.

Twitter said that it had become aware of the “technical issue” on Sunday. A spokesperson of the company, which provides the micro-blogging service, said that its teams had “worked swiftly to investigate and resolve the geotag issue”.

The glitch came to notice on Sunday when a journalist was doing a live broadcast from the Hall of Fame, a museum built by the Indian Army in Leh to honour the soldiers, who had sacrificed lives to protect the nation.

Twitter showed his location as “Jammu and Kashmir, People’s Republic of China”. The netizens soon took note of it and the micro-blogging website was flooded with calls to rectify the location.

Read: Twitter shows Jammu and Kashmir, Leh as part of China; irate users lambast platform

India and China are currently engaged in a military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) – the de facto boundary between the two nations – in eastern Ladakh. China recently reiterated that it did not recognize Ladakh as a Union Territory of India.

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had in August 2019 initiated the process to strip Jammu and Kashmir off its special status and reorganized the state into two Union Territories, China had joined its all-weather-ally Pakistan to oppose the move.

Twitter on Monday stated that it understood and respected the “sensitivities around the issue”.

The glitch on Twitter was noticed just a day after India’s north-eastern state Arunachal Pradesh as well as several other places in the country had gone missing from the default weather app on the smartphones manufactured by Xiaomi Corporation of China.

Since Arunachal Pradesh is at the centre of India-China boundary dispute in the eastern sector, the glitch on the smartphone fuelled speculation if it was deliberately done at the behest of the government of the communist country.

A spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Government recently re-asserted sovereignty of the communist country over Arunachal Pradesh.

A spokesperson of the company, however, said that the weather app on the smartphones had not shown for some time Arunachal Pradesh as well as some other cities and states of India due to some technical glitch, which it had now fixed.