Twitter on Saturday, 6 June, said that the brief restriction of Amul’s account on 4 June, happened after it had gotten caught in the platform’s security processes, according to PTI.
Amul’s Twitter account was blocked on 4 June evening and was restored the next day.
According to PTI, RS Sodhi, Managing Director of Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which owns Amul, said that Twitter blocked its handle @Amul_Coop after its advertising agency posted a cartoon featuring the ‘Amul girl’ with the caption “Exit the Dragon?”.
The cartoon appeared to support the new policy of `Atmanirbhar Bharat’ as well as a recent call for a boycott of Chinese products that has been erupting on Indian social media.
#Amul trended on Twitter after the news of the account being blocked broke, with many coming out in the company’s support.
PTI reported that on accessing the account, a message was seen that read thus: “This account is temporarily restricted. You’re seeing this warning because there has been some unusual activity from this account. Do you still want to view it?”
“Safety and security of the accounts is a key priority for us and to ensure an account has not been compromised sometimes we require the account owner to complete a simple reCAPTCHA process. These challenges are simple for authentic account owners to solve, but difficult (or costly) for spammy or malicious account owners to complete,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement, according to PTI.
No Official Message from Twitter Yet: Sodhi
Sodhi added that they did not know why the account had been blocked.
“We do not know why the account was blocked as we have not received any official statement from Twitter... Amul has not run any campaign against anybody,” Sodhi said, according to PTI, adding that the ‘Amul girl’ generally talks about topical subjects.
“When we learnt about this, we asked for clarification. We do not know why this disruption occurred. We have not yet received any official message from Twitter on this,” he said.
(With inputs from PTI.)
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