India's next prime minister barred from office's 1.24M Twitter following

India's next prime minister barred from office's 1.24M Twitter following
Office of the Indian prime minister changes its Twitter handle and won't give access to newly elected PM Narendra Modi.

magine if in 2016, when US President Barack Obama prepares to hand over the office of the presidency to his successor -- and all the digital assets of the office, including the 4.84 million follower strong @WhiteHouse Twitter account -- that he and his staff decide to sabotage the online efforts of the president elect.

That's precisely the showdown taking place in India Tuesday when the office of the Indian prime minister changed its official Twitter handle from @PMOIndia to @PMOIndiaArchive, taking its 1.24 million followers with it to the grave of outgoing PM Dr. Manmohan Singh's administration.

It raises an interesting question. When the division of a political office owns your Twitter account, who gets to decide what happens to it when a challenger beats the incumbent in an election?

The social network, founded in 2006, went public last year and now commands a user base of more than 255 million people. Long a forum for both culture and politics -- President Obama has the third most followed account at 43.1 million followers behind performers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber -- Twitter has become a tremendous utility for free speech in populous democratic countries like India and for direct communication between institutions and the people they govern.

The issue at hand with @PMOIndia is a sensitive matter. Because in changing the handle, the India PM's office unceremoniously decided that the next PM, Narendra Modi, will have to build his own following under a new @PMOIndia account, which currently has just over 9,000 followers after being created earlier today. Though Modi, who has a personal Twitter following of more than 4.2 million, is no stranger to audience building, it's not easy to transition all official messaging on a social platform to a new account with a minuscule audience.

The former @PMOIndia account is now reachable at @PMOIndiaArchive until May 20, 2014, whereupon it will be presumably archived and then deactivated. Modi's political faction, the Bharatiya Janata Party, took to Twitter to tell its robust audience of 525,000 followers that the @PMOIndia account is a "national digital asset" that is being handled illegally in the transition between administrations.

hahahahaha......funnnneeee !

Social Media in Politics is turning out to be Fun !  ::LOL::