Amid the growing allegations of bias against users belonging to right-wing ideology, today many users on microblogging site started Twitter complaining that suddenly numbers of retweets and likes on Tweets posted them declined after higher numbers were shown for them.
Several users on Twitter posted screenshots their tweets, which showed that retweets on likes on their tweets came down within a few minutes.
https://twitter.com/utkarsh_aanand/status/1095243300158681089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
People who were monitoring retweets of their tweets noticed that numbers of retweets were gradually coming down.
BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma alleged that her one tweet with more than 1200 retweets, which had criticised Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for sending a pregnant woman in his place to the Parliamentary committee, was later showing 505 tweets.
https://twitter.com/NupurSharmaBJP/status/1095247915952586752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
When we checked the tweet ourselves, we found the number of retweets on that tweet had come down even further to 211 at 3.30 PM.
The same allegation was made by several users on Twitter, many of them prominent right-wing names.
https://twitter.com/Iyervval/status/1095254313566232579?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/swati_gs/status/1095250655575461891?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/SushantBSinha/status/1095261159966437378?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s account was also not immune to this mysterious act of vanishing retweets, which was spotted by several people. One tweet by the PM saw the number of RTs and likes going down from 1661 and 5871 to 402 and 1480 respectively in just 3 minutes.
https://twitter.com/iAnkurSingh/status/1095243473467265024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Of course, it is not that retweets and likes are mysteriously going down only, they are going up also for some people. This video posted on Twitter shows a drastic change in retweets and likes on a Tweet by Congress president Rahul Gandhi.
https://twitter.com/TeamPayal/status/1095236883066408962?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The number of retweets suddenly increases to 1798 from 37, while the number of likes is shown as 5411 at first, then it comes down to 160, and then again reaches 5416.
It is not known whether it is happening due to motivated acts by Twitter or due to a bug in their software. Numerous people have tagged Twitter in their tweets, but the company has not responded yet.