The Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management in IIT Bombay has claimed that its Twitter account was compromised after one anti-BJP tweet was posted from the Twitter account.
Replying to a tweet posted by author Shefali Vaidya, the verified official Twitter handle of the institute had tweeted that Hinduism and Hindutva are not same, and being religious and being stupid are also different things. It then went on to claim that people here (West Bengal) may be religious but they are not stupid enough to vote for BJP.
After the tweet was posted, social media users started questioning how a tax-funded institution can post such politically biased comments. Soon the tweet was deleted by the institute. After that they posted another tweet saying that their account was compromised, and they issued an apology for the tweet. They also reiterated that the School neither endorses nor take a political stand or viewpoint.
This is a standard reply after such political comments get posted form official Twitter handles, which often happen because the handlers of such account forget to switch the account to their personal accounts before posting a personal tweet. It does not clarify what kind of compromise it was, was that account hacked, or whether someone with authorised access to the account misused it.
OpIndia had sent an email to the institution for further detail of the incident. In the reply, the Creatives and PR team of SJMSOM said that their Twitter account was compromised and someone, who is external to the institution, had posted the tweet. They also added that they will take effective counter-measures against such breaches in future.
The response by the institution suggests that the Twitter account was managed by an external agency, and someone in that external organisation had posted the anti-BJP Tweet. Probably a person with partisan politician views in that organisation was handling the Twitter account of the institution, and knowingly or unknowingly that tweet was posted from the official Twitter handle of SJMSOM by that person.
