“President Kovind makes Twitter debut, gains 3 million followers in one hour” – sections of the Indian media have been fawning over President Ram Nath Kovind gaining three million followers in the span of one hour. It sounds very impressive by all standards. But experience tells us that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
Leading media houses reported about the meteoric rise in the number of followers of President Kovind.
“Within minutes of taking over as the President, Ram Nath Kovind got nearly 3.25 million followers on popular social networking website Twitter,” Zee News reported.
What actually happened is that the Twitter account of the new President inherits the followers of the previous one.
How Does it Work?
Official Twitter accounts of the President, Vice President, various Ministries (@HMOIndia, @PMOIndia etc) are considered digital assets that belong to the government. Twitter has a strategy for digital transition when the occupant of a position changes to ensure continuity and preserve the digital history of the previous occupant.
This was followed in the case of the @POTUS handover from Obama to Trump and the same principle is being followed for the handover of the official account of the President of India @RashtrapatBhvn from President Pranab Mukherjee to President Ram Nath Kovind.
The process works as follows:
The new @RashtrapatiBhvn account starts with zero tweets and all the followers from the previous account. So when President Kovind inherited the @RashtrapatiBhvn Twitter account, he also inherited all its followers. President Mukherjee had 3+ million followers and this is the reason why it appears that President Kovind gained 3 million followers in a matter of a few minutes. The same had happened when Trump as @POTUS inherited 15 million+ followers of Obama.
Those who were following @RashtrapatiBhvn will notice that the number of people they are following has gone up by one. This is because they are now automatically following both @RashtrapatiBhvn and @POI13 accounts.
They may choose to unfollow one or the other later. Any new followers of either account will only follow that account.
@POI13 is only an archive and will probably not tweet anymore. President Mukherjee’s personal Twitter account is @CitiznMukherjee.
The process of transition is explained by Twitter India here:
(This story was first published on Alt News and has be republished with permission. The views expressed here are the author’s own.)
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