NEW DELHI: After removing and then restoring the blue verification badge from the Twitter account of Vice President, M Venkaiah Naidu the microblogging site today removed the blue verification badge from the personal accounts of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat and other leaders from the organisation.

Apart from Bhagwat, the blue tick was removed from five accounts belonging to senior RSS functionaries namely, Suresh Soni, Arun Kumar, Suresh Joshi and Krishna Gopal. 

Twitter had earlier removed the tick from the Vice President's handle @MVenkaiahNaidu, which has 13 lakh followers only to restore it later after the move was overwhelmingly criticised. The VP hasn’t tweeted from his personal account since July 2020 and his tweets are available on his official account and are signed #VPIVenkaiah to differentiate them from tweets by his office.

Reportedly the brief removal of the 'blue tick' from the vice president's handle was urgently taken up by the MeitY which had called it an 'outrageous act', adding that the vice president is a constitutional post.

As the blue verification badge of RSS leaders were remove, functionaries of RSS come out in protest against the social media giant. Taking strong objection, Rajiv Tuli, a functionary in RSS Delhi unit said that the unilateral actions of the microblogging site clearly shows biasness and 'tech feudalism' in a big country like India.

Later Tuli tweeted and said that after all the hackling verification tikcs of all the five RSS functionaries had been restored by Twitter. 

Meanwhile today, the Indian government has issued a final notice to Twitter for complying with the new IT rules for digital media intermediaries. According to Rakesh Maheshwari, group coordinator for cyber law at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), it has written a letter to Twitter’s deputy general counsel Jim Baker, saying that despite repeated letters from the ministry, Twitter had failed to provide adequate clarifications.