Bengaluru: Devi Prasad Rao is a man wearing different hats. He is an engineer, a banker and a social entrepreneur. He is very active on social media and doesn’t hesitate tweeting on controversial issues.

On May 3, Karnataka’s Rao tweeted a long post, detailing how the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, his family and close friends took a holiday in Bangaram island, Lakshadweep in the year 1988. He had also tweeted about how an aircraft carrier, INS Virat was diverted to serve the family during their holidays.

The long thread received good response, with over 2 lakh impressions on Twitter alone, and there is no counting on how well it was received on WhatsApp and FaceBook.

Four days later, on May 7, Rao, who hails from Mangaluru, added 26 more tweets to cover the other aspects relating to the same issue of misuse of power by the Gandhi family.

But within an hour, it is alleged that Rao was shadow banned.

Speaking to MyNation, he said, “I checked on shadowban.eu and I found I was Search Shadow banned. My tweets would be visible only to those who visit my timeline. I would not show up on others’ timelines.”

Rao has also written to Twitter and is awaiting a suitable response.

And Devi attributes the move to two probable reasons. “This could have happened because of reporting of my tweets by pro-Gandhi family loyalists or because Twitter AI algorithms are skewed against those that are writing on such topics,” he said.

Such an alleged move by Twitter has made Rao not just distraught but indignant as well.

“I feel I am being discriminated against because of my political affiliations. Is tweeting against the Gandhi family wrong? I have not used any abusive or hurtful language,” he questioned.

Shadow banning is “Deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.”

We tried contacting Twitter officials, but they were not available for comments. Once we get an official reply from Twitter, this story will be updated.