Twitter agrees to block six fake PMO accounts (Lead, Superseding earlier story)

New Delhi, Aug 23 (IANS) Social networking site Twitter has agreed to cooperate with the government in blocking six fake accounts "misrepresenting" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, officials said Thursday.

Twitter has around 16 million accounts in India.

"Twitter has agreed to cooperate in blocking the six fake PM accounts. and we welcome their cooperation. They responded to our complaint, saying we need to follow an internal channel to lodge a formal complaint in the matter," the prime minister's media adviser Pankaj Pachauri told IANS.

"We have forwarded their communication to the ministry of communications and IT for necessary action," Pachauri said.

"We had earlier complained through email to the six fake twitter accounts individually," he said.

According to Pachauri, a person behind one of the accounts PM0India wrote back saying he had changed the name of his twitter account to thehinduexpress, which proved that some people were up to some mischief on the social networking site.

The official said the fact that the government sought just six accounts out of 16 million to be blocked for misrepresenting the prime minister shows New Delhi did not favour a blanket ban on Twitter.

Some of the fake Twitter accounts misrepresenting the prime minister included @Indian_pm, @PMOIndiaa, @dryumyumsingh, @PM0India.

Officials said the source of these fake accounts could be outside the country.

Opening the prime minister's Twitter account was Pachauri's brainchild to reach out to the community through new media after he joined the PMO early this year.

Over the past few days, the government has also blocked around 300 websites which it blamed for spreading rumours that sparked an exodus of the northeast people from Bangalore and Chennai.