Pradeep Poonia Points Finger At WhiteHat Jr After Twitter Suspends His Account

Software engineer Pradeep Poonia, a vocal critic of edtech coding startup WhiteHat Jr, informed in a LinkedIn post on Sunday (December 6), that his Twitter account @whiteHatSnr had been suspended that morning. 

Poonia has alleged that the Twitter account suspension was WhiteHat Jr’s doing, as part of the ongoing defamation proceedings initiated against him by the BYJU’S owned startup. 

“So after taking down 17 videos, 2 YT channels, 2 Reddit accounts, 1 Twitter handle, 1 Quora account, 3 LinkedIn articles, then this LinkedIn account itself, filing a 20 crore defamation lawsuit against me, then legally making me remove 12 tweets and 4 YouTube videos, now they ‘somehow’ took down my Twitter handle @whiteHatSnr itself,” Poonia wrote on LinkedIn. 

Poonia told Inc42 that his Twitter account suspension is a measure of “harassment” against him by WhiteHat Jr. 

Poonia said that he has learnt that his Twitter account suspension has come in response to a complaint that had been registered against him by WhiteHat Jr before the company proceeded to file a defamation case against him. Poonia was unsure about the nature of the edtech startup’s complaint against his Twitter account. 

On November 22, Inc42 reported that WhiteHat Jr CEO Karan Bajaj had filed a $2.6 Mn defamation suit against Poonia, for his tweets and other social media posts criticising the edtech startup’s curriculum, their mode of functioning and their advertisements. 

The defamation notice sent to Poonia specified that Poonia had started his defamation spree in early September by making comments on WhiteHat Jr’s advertisements concerning an imaginary child “Wolf Gupta”, a teen who had supposedly landed a job in Google. 

“The Defendant’s posts quickly turned sinister subsequent to the withdrawal of the advertisements, with the defendant claiming that Plaintiff No. 1 [WhiteHat Jr] had “murdered” Wolf Gupta,” the notice read. 

The next hearing in the defamation case against Poonia, in the Delhi High Court, is on January 6, 2021. 

Last month, WhiteHat Jr had also filed a $1.9 Mn defamation case against another of its and parent BYJU’S vocal critics, angel investor Aniruddha Malpani.