Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has revealed he once thought his account on X was under a “shadow ban,” prompting him to approach billionaire Elon Musk, (owner), only to be informed there was no problem.
Tharoor posted: “Good question. This has been the case for four years! A source at the old Twitter India told me there was a problem he couldn’t understand: he had reviewed my daily statistics over six months, and found a strange pattern — my followers went up by over 1000 a day, about 60 – 70 “unfollowed” me each day, but my overall followers total wouldn’t budge above 8.495 million.”
The Congress MP said that he had initially thought it was a an “algorithm glitch” and left X. He explained the reason for him to suspect the his handle was “shadow banned” and why he wrote to Musk.
“Since my account is never “suggested” for anyone to follow, and many of my followers complain about not receiving most of my posts on their timeline, I wondered if i had been “shadow-banned”,” said Tharoor.
“I wrote to @elonmusk to inquire about this and received a lawyer’s letter in return — flatly denying there was a problem! The only practical consequence of my inquiry is that my followers count now drops unsteadily each day — from the peak of 8.495m to 8.429m today,” Tahoor said.
Tharoor said there was “clearly something wrong” those helming X in India “don’t care about”, and people began noticing his stagnant follower count and asking him about it.
