Farmers Protests: Twitter lit up as Republic Day tractor rally turned violent in Delhi

New Delhi: Twitter lit up as the Republic Day tractor rally turned violent, so much so that the social media company suspended over 500 accounts and banned what it said were “certain terms” that “violated its rules”.

As protestors broke barricades, clashed with the police and then infamously hoisted the Nishan Sahib flag from Red Fort, there was a flood of hashtags — including Delhi under attack, Shame on tractor rally, Farmers protests, Kisan nahi gunde, Khalistani, Sikh, Tiranga — and lakhs of tweets.

‘Delhiunderattack' attracted 1.25 lakh tweets, conversations on ‘RakeshTikait’, the Bharatiya Kisan Union spokesperson, attracted over one lakh tweets, and posts centred around Deep Sidhu, the man alleged to have led the Red Fort mob, saw over 81,000 tweets.


There were over a lakh posts on Twitter on the term ‘Khalistani’ on Tuesday, over 1.72 lakh on the hashtag ‘farmersprotests’ and over 1.43 lakh posts on calls for arresting farmer leaders. Posts centred around ‘Tiranga’ generated around 27,000 tweets.

Predictably, much of the chatter on social media was heated. In a response to ET’s queries, Twitter said suspension of more than 500 accounts was ‘strong’ enforcement action taken to protect conversations from attempts to incite violence, abuse and threats.

“Using a combination of technology and human review, Twitter worked at scale and took action judiciously and impartially on hundreds of accounts and tweets that have been in violation of Twitter rules,” said a company spokesperson.

“We have also applied labels to tweets that were found to be in violation of the synthetic and manipulated media policy. We are monitoring the situation closely and remain vigilant, and strongly encourage those on the service to report anything they believe is in violation of rules,” the spokesperson added.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company too was monitoring the situation closely and will remove content that violates its community standards. “We are also working with independent fact-checkers to place warning labels to help people make more informed choices about what they read and share,” the spokesperson added.

Delhi Police on Sunday said over 300 Twitter handles had been created in Pakistan ahead of Republic Day to mislead users and cause confusion.

Fact-checkers had a busy day, too. “As a fact-checker, I can’t prejudge how this will impact the movement. But there are a lot of videos and stills which have come out of the violence,” said Saurabh Shukla, founder of Newsmobile.in, a fact-checker working with Facebook.

“We have observed a sudden spurt in handles in Pakistan sharing visuals from the protest. These are the times when we can help social media platforms like Facebook even more, to remove misinformation related to the incident,” he added.

Pratik Sinha, founder of fact-checking website Alt News, said misinformation around the protests had been on the rise. “As soon as the Red Fort visuals came out, users started calling the flag being hoisted a Khalistani flag and alleged that the farmers were Khalistanis committing an act of terror. We debunked that on Tuesday and at least four more stories were being debunked on Wednesday.”