The Centre on Thursday nnounced the new guidelines for social media and OTT platforms and Twitter was abuzz with hot takes.
The announcement was made jointly by IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javdekar as the matter concerned both ministries.
Some rules were laid down for significant social media and OTT platforms with an aim of countering fake news, hate speech, graphic imagery in cinema, etc. Concerns have been raised about rampant abuse of social media platforms and spread of fake news and the government is bringing in a "soft touch" regulation, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said while announcing the new guidelines.
While releasing the guidelines, Mr Prasad also gave statistics about the number of social media users in the country. Here's the number of social media users in India:
WhatsApp- 53 crore
YouTube- 44.8 crore
Facebook- 41 crore
Instagram- 21 crore
Twitter 1.75 crore
It can be noticed that the social media website Twitter has the least followers in India - 1.75 crore. However, people were quick to compare this number to the number of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's followers on Twitter. Interestingly, while only 1.75 crore Indians use Twitter, PM Modi has 6.6 crore followers. Hence, Twitterati is confused. They are asking that who are the rest of 4.85 crore followers?
Multiple people have raised doubts over this issue. This data has gone viral and people are asking whether the followers are foreign or fake accounts and bots? Some are questioning the accuracy of the data provided by the government.
The answer to these questions isn't out yet but public reactions are. Here are some of them.
