Micro-blogging site Twitter on Thursday night removed the display picture (DP) of Union Home Minister Amit Shah over copyright violation. Upon clicking on his profile picture, a message appeared instead: Media not displayed, this image has been removed in response to a report from the copyright holder.
The picture was removed for about 20 minutes before it was reinstated by Twitter. Amit Shah’s account was also reportedly locked for a brief period of time over the alleged copyright violation. It turned out that Twitter took the action after someone claimed copyright on the image. However, as soon as the questions arose on the action, Twitter reinstated the same picture.
In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said that the profile of the Union Home Minister was locked due to an inadvertent error. “Due to an inadvertent error, we temporarily locked this account under our global copyright policies. This decision was reversed immediately and the account is fully functional,” a Twitter spokesperson told ANI.
Twitter restores profile photo of Union Home Minister Amit Shah's account, earlier it had removed the photo over claims in “response to a report from a copyright holder”. pic.twitter.com/uhW3kNtpgn
— ANI (@ANI) November 12, 2020
Union Minister Amit Shah has a popular following on social media. He is the second leader in the country after Prime Minister Narendra Modi in terms of the highest number of followers on Twitter. He has 23.6 million followers. The Home Minister follows only 296 people.
According to Twitter’s policy, the social media platform responds to reports of alleged copyright infringement, such as allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted image as a profile or header photo, allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted video or image uploaded through our media hosting services, or Tweets containing links to allegedly infringing materials.
Twitter’s policy adds that the photographer and NOT the subject of a photograph is the actual rights holder of the resulting photograph.
Earlier this month, Twitter had taken down the display picture of the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI) over copyright violation.