The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has decided to unblock nearly 10,000 Twitter accounts, which were blocked by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime.
The PMO has already received nearly 4,000 requests to unlock accounts which were blocked for making fun of then PM Dr Manmohan Singh. The accounts were blocked by a team led by the Singh's media advisor Pankaj Pachauri
Recently, Facebook, in its transparency report for 2013, had disclosed that India led the world in the number of censorship requests. India, it said, restricted content 4,765 times. In comparison, Turkey, which came second, restricted content only 2,014 times.
The PMO twitter handle has a following of 1.26 million. In 2012, the PMO handle used to get 32,000 followers a day.
"Nearly 2,000 followers have already been unblocked. By the end of this week, we would be able to unblock all the blocked followers. This number is expected to be around 8,000-10,000," said a member of the BJP's social media team.
This is not the first time the news of blocked followers have come to the fore. In 2012 as well, the PMO had forced Twitter to block a dozen of parody accounts which people used to make fun of then PM Dr Singh. Later, all these accounts were unblocked under media pressure.
Under Manmohan Singh, the PMO used to follow 123 people – a majority of them being heads of various countries. Modi's team is preparing a new list of handles to follow.
Modi, who is very active on Twitter, has around 45 lakh followers, which is second only to US president Barack Obama.
