Twitter users woke up this morning to a bunch of ‘leaked’ screenshots posted by a Kolkata-based Twitter user, @seemantinibose. In a now deleted tweet, Bose had accused a few Twitter users of inappropriate behaviour.
Soon, Twitter user @pokershash tweeted that Seemantini’s account is compromised by Pakistani hackers.
https://twitter.com/pokershash/status/1174088104237355008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
OpIndia got in touch with a visibly anxious and traumatised Seemantini who believes that her account was perhaps targetted by Pakistani hackers in a bid to embarrass Prime Minister Modi who had followed her last evening along with various other supporters. “I was browsing my timeline at around 2 AM when suddenly I started receiving OTP (one-time password). I tweeted but that tweet was deleted by the person who had taken over my account. Suddenly my account vanished from the phone,” she said. After 6 hours of ordeal, her Twitter account was finally restored some minutes back.
“Now that the Prime Minister followed me, I don’t want to put him in an embarrassing situation. I don’t want to let him down,” she says. The hacker had sent across direct messages to Prime Minister Modi and a lot of her other friends in a bid to shame her.
Essentially, the Pakistani hacker was taking out his frustration over abrogation of Article 370, while trying to defame PM Modi’s supporters.
Bose suspects that her account was compromised to embarrass PM Modi along with the Twitter user pokershash who has been mocking Pakistani leaders on twitter since quite a few weeks now. He had recently fooled Pakistani minister Ch Fawad Hussain on Twitter by pretending to be a Pakistani with insider information on undercover RAW agent in Pakistan. After that he had tricked Fawad Hussain into believing that India had threatened Sri Lankan players that they will be ousted from Indian Premier League (IPL) if they don’t cancel their Pakistan tour.
Embarrassed that Indians got their goat (figuratively, not literally) for having Ch Fawad Hussain as a minister, Pakistani hackers hacked into Bose’s account to embarrass PM Modi and Twitter user @pokershash.
Reacting to the accusations of ‘harassment’ levelled by the hacker of Bose’s account, @pokershash said that Pakistani minister has now turned into a full-time troll. “Since government removed Article 370, Pakistani politicians started spreading fake news on Kashmir using old and unrelated videos. So we decided to send them more fake videos, mostly bollywood, in DM. From Pakistan’s Rail minister to science & technology minister, every minister is being trolled by us. Minister Fawad Chaudhury was our favourite punching bag. Indians are trolling him on Twitter and even on WhatsApp now. Fawad in his frustration started posting fake chat of Narendra Modi. Now they are using hackers to hack accounts of people recently followed by PM Modi and posting irrelevant chat to target Modi supporters.”
With this, Pakistan has again taken the Indian ‘liberal’ line who regularly peddle the narrative that PM Modi follows abusive people. Ever since PM Modi has come to power at the Centre back in 2014, the mainly leftist establishments have envisioned a brand new angle to target him. Under that angle, a leftist propaganda blog and an alleged fact-checking website attacked the PM for following individuals on Twitter who as per them hurled abuses, spread misinformation online.
This predictably gained a fair amount of traction in certain sections of social media and even the mainstream media. Incidentally, while this episode was playing out, the spotlight barely focused on similar faults of other political parties and their leaders.
Amusingly, even though former Congress President Rahul Gandhi and Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal also follow abusive trolls, the leftist establishment have their guns trained only on PM Modi.
Irony hit a new low when abusive troll masquerading as a journalist started ‘shaming’ those who are followed by the PM.
https://twitter.com/bainjal/status/1018805888990236675?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
So much that she even wrote an entire book on trolls and surprisingly didn’t name herself as one.
https://twitter.com/bainjal/status/912512021148479488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
That Pakistanis are now toeing the ‘liberal’ line in a bid to embarrass PM Modi is not surprising. They have done it before. And quite likely that they will do it again.