Twitter Has Suspended The Account Of One Of India’s Most Influential Tweeters, Gabbar Singh

OfficeChai Team

Twitter appears to have suspended the account of Gabbar Singh, one of India’s most popular twitter personalities. 

As of today, Gabbar Singh’s account (@gabbbarsingh) shows this message.

gabbar singh twitter suspended

 

Gabbar Singh was one of the early adopters of Twitter in India, and quickly gained a large following thanks to his dose of funny one liners. His tweets are regularly cited in prominent publications, and he amassed over 4 lakh followers on the social networking site. Being someone who talks about current affairs in India, his tweets often have political undertones.

And it appears that one such tweet has led him afoul of Twitter. Early today morning, hours before his account had been suspended, Gabbar Singh had poked fun at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. 

The joke itself is tame by twitter standards, and it shouldn’t result in an expulsion. Kejriwal’s party, though, has a large following on Twitter, and it’s likely that they reported the tweet as offensive en masse, and it led to Gabbar Singh’s expulsion.

Another theory doing the rounds is that Gabbar Singh could have been suspended for sharing a video clip from a upcoming movie, which amounts to copyright infringement.

While the reasons behind his suspension aren’t clear, this isn’t the first time Twitter has been criticized for its strong-armed policy regarding the suspension of user accounts. Earlier this year, it had prominently banned conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos from its site, accusing him of inciting hatred. Yiannopoulos had maintained that Twitter being a neutral platform shouldn’t impede free speech, and accused it of having a strong liberal bias. Twitter has been struggling in recent months, having shut down popular video sharing service Vine and laying off over 350 employees.

We’ve contacted Twitter India for the take, we’ll update this article when we hear from them.

Update: As of 6:45 pm, Twitter has restored Gabbar Singh’s account. He’s said that the suspension was not because of the Arvind Kejriwal tweet.

But because of a suspected copyright infringement from sharing a clip from a movie theatre screening of a movie.

https://twitter.com/GabbbarSingh/status/793450472661069824

 

However, on a closer inspection, Twitter did not find the tweet to be a violation of a copyright.