A day after users of Xiaomi phones in India complained that the device didn’t display weather reports for places in Arunachal Pradesh, Twitter was caught in a storm on Sunday after it showed Jammu and Kashmir as a part of China during a live broadcast by a journalist at a war memorial in Leh, the capital of Ladakh.
According to reports, Nitin Gokhale, author and national security analyst, started the live broadcast on Twitter from the Hall of Fame, a memorial for troopers. The location tag displayed in the video was marked ‘Jammu and Kashmir, People’s Republic of China.’
Twitter users, including Mr. Gokhale himself, immediately pointed out the error by tagging the official handles of Twitter and Twitter India. However, there have been no replies from either account regarding the matter.
“Twitter folks, I just did a live from the Hall of Fame. Giving Hall of Fame as the location and guess what it is saying Jammu & Kashmir, Peoples Republic of China! Are you guys nuts?” Mr. Gokhale tweeted following his live broadcast. He had also asked other users to tag the location as Hall of Fame, Leh and go live on Twitter.
Kanchan Gupta, a fellow of the Observer Research Foundation, also commented about the issue. “So @Twitter has decided to reconfigure geography and declare Jammu & Kashmir as part of People’s Republic of #China . If this is not a violation of #India laws, what is? Citizens of India have been punished for far less. But US Big Tech is above the law? Mr. Gupta tweeted.
Some other users tried uploading images and live broadcasts with their location tagged as Leh. However, the observations were similar and the Hall of Fame in Leh was displayed as part of China.
The two incidents also come at a time amid border tensions between India and China.
In response, a twitter spokesperson told the news agency ANI that they understand and respect the sensitivities around the technical issue. He added that the teams worked swiftly to investigate and resolve the concerned geotag issue.
