Actor-turned-Congress leader Divya Spandana aka Ramya, has found herself in the midst of yet another controversy.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Amit Malviya, who is the National Head of the party’s Information and Technology department, on Wednesday, 7 February, shared a controversial video on Twitter, where Ramya is seen urging Congress workers in Karnataka to create multiple fake social media accounts.
In his tweet, Malviya accused Ramya, who is in-charge of the Congress Party’s digital communication, of encouraging her party workers to create multiple fake social media accounts so they could “spread misinformation about the Modi government”.
In the video, Ramya is heard saying in Kannada:
Today you all have to create three accounts. One in your name, one in someone else’ and the third by the name of Srivastava. Fake accounts are bots. It’s a robot, not a person.Ramya
According to NDTV, a worker then turns to her and tells her its wrong, following which she says: “You can have many accounts if you want... there is nothing wrong in having many accounts.”
Social media soon started buzzing with responses to Malviya’s accusation, with users sharing the video and trolling the Congress leader for her attempts to resort to such measures for increasing Rahul Gandhi’s popularity.
However, Ramya soon responded with a series of tweets, stating that the “video had been edited out of context”.
Ramya’s Response to the Video
Sharing the video on Twitter herself, Ramya said that the video had been edited for the opposing party’s “convenience”.
She went on to clarify that at this particular event, she was explaining the difference between bots, fake accounts and multiple accounts to a question from a member of the audience.
She added that what the video didn’t show was her telling the Karnataka-based Congress workers that if they wished to express their individual views on any issue, they should do it on their personal handles and not through the party’s official handle.
Responding to Times Now’s report on her allegedly urging her party workers to create fake accounts, she said that she was speaking exclusively to the assembly coordinators who handle the party’s official account in terms of the difference in bots, fake accounts and multiple accounts for their knowledge.
Ramya was recently cast in another social media controversy, where she received severe backlash for responding to a tweet on PM Narendra Modi’s usage of the acronym “TOP” (tomato, onion and potato) as a priority for farmers, with a twitter post of her own that said “Is this what happens when you’re on POT?”
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