Twitter tags BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya's tweet as 'manipulated media'

NEW DELHI: Twitter tagged a tweet by BJP politician Amit Malviya as "manipulated media" on Tuesday, the first such instance in India. He is national-in-charge of BJP's information and technology department.
The tweet, dated November 28, was related to the ongoing farmers protests in the National Capital Region. Malviya, while "countering" Congress MP Rahul Gandhi's tweet about police brutality against farmers, had tweeted out a video to allegedly wrongly claim that farmers were not beaten up, but were just "threatened".

On Tuesday, Twitter applied the "manipulated media" tag to Malviya's tweet. The microblogging platform applies such tags to any photo, audio or video "that have been deceptively altered or fabricated" to "mislead" people. Earlier Twitter had extensively used this label during the run up to the United States Presidential elections, including on Donald Trump's tweets.
"The referenced Tweet was labeled based on our Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy," a Twitter spokesperson told TOI on Wednesday. Manipulated media was also one of the top 20 trends in India on Tuesday morning.
Gandhi, while tweeting out a picture of a farmer being beaten up by a man in a paramilitary uniform, had written, "This is an extremely unfortunate photo. Our slogan used to be "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan". But today, the Prime Minister's arrogance has made jawans stand against farmers."
Malviya had quoted Gandhi's tweet and countered him with a clip with two parallel videos titled "propaganda and reality". The 15 second long video claimed that the security personnel did not even "touch farmer" (sic). "Rahul Gandhi must be the most discredited opposition leader India has seen in a long long time," Malviya wrote. His post had received over 7k retweets.

According to Twitter, it applies this label to tweets that "result in confusion or misunderstanding or suggests a deliberate intent to deceive people about the nature or origin of the content, for example by falsely claiming that it depicts reality." Twitter uses its own technology or receives reports through partnerships with third parties to determine and tag manipulated media. The company had come up with this policy in February 2020, but this is the first time in India that it has used this label for a mainstream politician.