Those who have refused include CM’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, Derek O’Brien, Firhad Hakim and Mahua Moitra.
New Delhi: The social media accounts of a select few “big” leaders of All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) are being handled by their own personal staff, unlike those of the rest of the MPs and MLAs whose passwords have been given to the social media team of political consulting group, Indian-Political Action Committee (I-PAC) which has been engaged by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led AITC with the objective to remain in power in West Bengal.
Among the leaders who have refused to give their social media access to I-PAC, including that of Facebook and Twitter, are party Lok Sabha MP and Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien, high profile minister Firhad Hakim, and party Lok Sabha MPs Mahua Moitra, Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan.
It is pertinent to mention that party Rajya Sabha MP Dinesh Trivedi, who recently left the TMC and is likely to join the BJP in the coming days, has alleged that his social media handles were taken over by members of I-PAC who posted “abusive tweets”. The Sunday Guardian reached out to the media team of Indian-Political Action Committee (I-PAC )for their comment on the allegations raised by Trivedi, but no response was shared.
In case of these “big’ leaders, the I-PAC team sends the tweets and content for Facebook to the people attached with these senior Trinamool Congress leaders and if they find it to their liking, share it further.
In the past, multiple Trinamool Congress party leaders had come on record to say that they were not even aware that they had a Twitter account in their names.
The TMC leaders, including MPs and MLA, joined the social media platform in the end of 2019, around September 2019 after I-PAC took over the campaigning of Trinamool.
The Twitter account of all the TMC leaders were “immediately” “verified”, as a source put it, on the basis of a list sent by the office of Abhishek Banerjee to Payal Kamat, who handles “public policy and government’ at Twitter.
It is pertinent to mention that Kamat had worked for Indian-Political Action Committee as their communication manager from August 2015 to April 2018. Twitter, as a rule applicable to the “common users” as facts show, has suspended the verification process in 2017.