Siddaramaiah seeks legal action against men impersonating his identity on social media

Team Udayavani, Mar 1, 2019, 4:20 AM IST

Bengaluru: Former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday asked Karnataka Home Minister MB Patil to take legal action against people impersonating him on the social media with an intent to malign his identity.

The request comes a day after he tweeted about morphed tweets that has characteristics of his official twitter handle being circulated in the social media.

“Morphed tweets with my official handle are being circulated in social media by few unethical users. This image has a logo of a group ‘Troll Sisyandru’. I urge @BlrCityPolice to take immediate action against those involved & I also request Shri.@MBPatil to look into the issue,” Siddaramaiah had tweeted.

The tweet was tagged with a picture of the morphed tweet that read “Today Indian Air Force has attacked on BAGALAKOT. Deep codomienses to the terrorists families. May their souls rest in piece (sic).”

Interestingly, Bagalkote is the district where Siddaramaiah’s constituency Badami is located. Siddaramaiah, in a letter to Patil, said he was constrained to report to him, “the criminal act of impersonating my identity on social media with intent of maligning my identity.”

He said a social media group ‘Troll Sisyandru’ on Instagram had posted a morphed image of a tweet with the characteristics of his official twitter handle, which had content that amounted to sedition and also contradicting his own views.

In the letter, a copy of which was also sent to the Commissioner of Police, Bangalore City, T Suneel Kumar, he said he had neither tweeted the content in the image nor anything that implied the same.

Stating that the group had circulated the offensive and false material on the internet, Siddaramaiah said the offensive material was not only false, “but frivolous, defamatory, abusive and insinuative” and had been done with the intention to insult and libel him and cause a scandal by slandering and slurring his character.

“This amounts to making impersonation and defamatory comment on social media and several persons have already asked me about the same, believing the same to be true.”

The group responsible was liable for prosecution for offensive comment on the social media and other offences, he further said, adding that “I request you to take legal action against the said person at the earliest.”