After the government had announced a ban on 59 Chinese apps, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided to quit the Chinese microblogging website Weibo, which he had joined a few years ago. PM Modi had 115 posts on Weibo. It was decided to manually delete them & after much effort 113 posts were removed, news agency ANI reported quoting sources.
All information from PM Modi’s account – including his profile photo – were taken down. PM Modi’s Weibo account was set up in 2015 before his first visit to China as Prime Minister. Since then the account had 2,44,000 followers, many of them Chinese.
For VIP accounts, the microblogging website has a more complex procedure to quit which is why an official process to deactivate the account was initiated. However, for reasons best known to the Chinese authorities, there was a great delay in granting this basic permission.
In a major decision, the government on Monday banned at least 59 Chinese apps including TikTok. Many popular apps like Shareit, Helo, Shein, Likee, WeChat, UC Browser also figured among the list of the banned Chinese apps. The decision, aimed at "safeguarding" the interests of crores of Indian mobile and internet users, is a targeted move to ensure the safety and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace, the Ministry of Electronics, and Information Technology said in the official notification.
