LONDON: Press officers at Britain’s main business membership organisation — the Confederation of British Industry (known as CBI in the UK) — spend hours every day scrolling through hundreds of tweets about the Kathua gangrape, Karnataka election, Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya, looking for tweets that might actually be meant for them.
This CBI is Britain’s premier business lobbying group that speaks on behalf of 1,90,000 businesses, representing a third of the UK private sector and seven million people. The British version of the
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), it lobbies the UK government on education, infrastructure and represents the views of UK businesses overseas.
It even has a small office in Delhi with three staffers, who represent British business interests in India. But the London press team is getting deluged with tweets aimed at the CBI in India, which does not have its own Twitter handle. George Bush, communications advisor at the UK CBI, told TOI that they were inundated every day with tweets written in a variety of Indian languages, as well as in English, meant for India’s CBI and had no idea what half of them were about.
“We use Hootsuite (a social media management platform). I would say more than 90% of the mentions CBI are meant for the
Indian CBI and more than half of the tweets directed at our Twitter handle @CBItweets are meant for them too. A lot of them are in Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi..., so I can’t understand them. We often want to see what people have said about our CBI… and it’s impossible as so many are for the Indian CBI,” said Bush.
He then read out a tweet from BJP Karnataka’s Twitter account: “Who are Anand Singh & B
Nagendra then? Are they saints of Bellary? Forgotten that they were jailed on illegal mining charges? & now, you have rewarded them with
Cong tickets & withdrawn CBI investigation!!” There is one here from one Tushar Dalal.
He puts, ‘I can say that, Govt of Kashmir has named some innocents in #KathuaCase just to hide the truth to escape from CBI inquiry,” Bush said.
Bush said: “We look at Hootsuite all day long and all these tweets come up directed at the Indian CBI. I think it might be helpful if the CBI got a Twitter account. We just have to scroll down a lot more to find tweets meant for us. It’s quite amusing. India is a much more populous country and the CBI in India deals with controversial things so it attracts a vast amount of tweets. But we would like to see tweets about what we say on various issues, without they being clogged with these.”