Twitter Silent As Anurag Kashyap Mysteriously Loses Followers After Anti-CAA Remarks

In yet another controversy related to the microblogging site Twitter, users, who were previously following Anurag Kashyap, have discovered that the film director has been mysteriously removed from their list of followed accounts.

Baffled with the losing number of followers, which earlier stood at over 500K users, Kashyap also took to the microblogging platform and said that his followers count dropped to 76.3K.

 

Further, film director, producer and screenwriter, Vikramaditya Motwane, in a tweet highlighted that, on Sunday (December 22), he realised that Kashyap was missing from his followed users list. However, according to Motwane, he was following Kashyap till Saturday.

I was following @anuragkashyap72 till yesterday. What’s going on @TwitterIndia? pic.twitter.com/iAa6972ohp

— Vikramaditya Motwane (@VikramMotwane) December 22, 2019

Speaking to Inc42, Twitter declined to comment on the development. It must be noted that Kashyap had recently deactivated his Twitter account.

Other users, who were also following Kashyap, also tweeted about this bizarre incident after they had unfollowed the filmmaker without actually doing so.

I did not unfollow @anuragkashyap72 yet something happened. What is going on @TwitterIndia? Now followed him back. pic.twitter.com/xgdUO4xq6h

— Ankur Bhardwaj (@Bhayankur) December 21, 2019

@anuragkashyap72 i was a follower of Anurag Kashyap! @TwitterSupport and @TwitterIndia please tell me how, I unfollowed him? Are u working for the Govt of India? pic.twitter.com/E6HAsr5S16

— N Sai Balaji (@nsaibalaji) December 21, 2019

Replying to Kashyap’s tweet, journalist Barkha Dutt alleged that it has been a year since Twitter has capped follower count for her profile.

The recent drop in the number of followers for the director comes at a time when he has remained quite vocal against the government for police brutality at Jamia Milia Islamia University and the controversial citizenship amendment act (CAA).

This is not the first time that Twitter has been surrounded by controversies which have remained unexplained till now. Earlier this week, the company said that private messages and tweets of users may have been accessed by unauthorised third-parties.

Recently, many of India’s scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST) and other backward class (OBC) activists have claimed that the social media platform is creating exclusion of sorts by neglecting verified tags for accounts which support these communities or work with them.

Moreover, there have been instances where people in close relation to the political class — and those belonging to affluent families — with barely any followers and a single tweet have verified account status. Notably, an account belonging to Jay Shah, son of the union home minister Amit Shah, on Twitter had 0 tweets and 27 followers as on Nov 6, 2019. But to the surprise of many, his account reflected the verified status on Twitter