In February of this year Twitter was accused of getting Jammu & Kashmir’s location wrong with it showing Jammu in Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir in China when the state got searched for. This was then followed by the government’s possible strict plan to punish wrongful depiction of the country’s borders with a fine of 100 cr and possible jail time.
The location controversy by Twitter surfaced again today when our regular columnist Ashutosh (@muglikar_) tweeted to Twitter India about the location in the tweet by journalist Anjana Om Kashyap being given as Jammu And Kashmir, People’s republic of China.
The background of the tweet referred to Twitter India’s recent actions pertaining to suspending right wing accounts after they criticized the Aam Aadmi Party. Rather than carefully looking into the matter, the ‘Senior Director of Twitter Asia Pacific’ outright accused Ashutosh of photoshopping the post just to cause mischief.
Ashutosh quickly responded to the allegations by presenting the source of the screenshot which incidentally was taken from an article we published yesterday.
The response from ‘Senior Director Twitter Asia-Pacific’ was perplexing to say the least and he made no effort to apologize or assure uses that the issue would be looked into.
Then a guy who goes by the name Village Idiot proceed the explain the issue in details. In it he explained what the ‘Senior Director Twitter Asia Pacific’ could have found out had he not been blinded by contempt towards Ashutosh. As Village Idiot explained, for any normal tweet the location stays okay but the issue crops up in case of embedded tweets. Or to put another way the normal tweet show one location, the embedded ones show another.
Furthermore, Twitter user Nagendra Srikanth explained all this in geeky details which attributed the anomaly to a bug but even he agreed that there’s more to the story than meets the eye and that they do have J&K in China according to J&K’s location code. The anomaly had nothing to do with the tweet but with that particular location that is Jammu and Kashmir. And the reason this issue is not surfacing on the regular tweets as Twitter tends to shorten location details for the same.
Both Ashutosh and Village Idiot then gave more examples of the anomaly which also included examples where Jammu Kashmir was seen as a part of Pakistan.
After the ‘Senior Director Twitter Asia Pacific’ was called out and after repeated promptings from Ashutosh, the ‘Head of Public Policy Twitter India’ with surprising amount of courtesy asked about the issue and promised to take action.
As this piece was being written, the issue remains unresolved but the ‘Senior Director Twitter Asia Pacific’ did finally apologize and promise rectification: