Twitter restores verified badge to VP Venkaiah Naidu's personal handle hours after removing it

Twitter said the account has been inactive since July 2020

Twitter on Saturday briefly removed the verified blue tick on the personal account of Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu and some RSS leaders citing inactivity.

The verified badge was restored after the Vice President’s office flagged the matter with Twitter. The ‘blue ticks’ on the RSS leaders' Twitter handles, though inactive, were also restored later.

Besides Naidu, several top RSS leaders, including RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Suresh Soni, also found their verified badges missing on Saturday morning. The Twitter accounts of RSS leaders Krishna Gopal, Arun Kumar, Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi also did not carry the verified badges.

“Twitter India removed blue ticks of these handles of RSS office bearers. We are to get in touch, but no one responds. Strange. So, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu is not the only one. This digital imperialism cannot be tolerated,” Delhi RSS leader Rajiv Tuli said.

According to Twitter, the personal account of Naidu – @MVenkaiahNaidu – had been inactive for nearly one year and the verified badge was removed by an algorithm designed to identify inactive accounts.

Bhagwat, Soni and Joshi have not posted a single tweet since the accounts were created in May 2019. While Gopal and Kumar – both joint general secretaries of RSS – have re-tweeted a handful of tweets made from the RSS Twitter handle.

Tuli said the verified badges on the Twitter handles were restored after "all the hackling".

Officials in Naidu’s office said Twitter had restored the verified badge on the personal account before 10:30 am. The last tweet posted from Naidu’s personal handle was on July 23 last year.

The Vice President uses the official Twitter handle @VPSecretariat to send out tweets.