Rajdeep Sardesai leaves Twitter

Some people log on to twitter only to have a fight with whoever they call trolls? What a waste!

— shilpi tewari (@shilpitewari) May 1, 2016

Television journalist Rajdeep Sardesai's sudden exit from Twitter is the current talk of town across media. For years, the journalist and his wife have been victims of constant social media sledging questioning their integrity. However after April 30th incident when many abusive direct messages (DM) were allegedly "sent" from his account, Sardesai apparently decided to call it quits. "There has been a campaign of abuse in last one week and it has been extremely personal, and apparently DMs (direct messages) have been sent from my account which I haven’t sent so I have informed Twitter about it," Rajdeep said.

@Atheist_Krishna just see what reply he sent pic.twitter.com/DX8NfIehfX

— laali (@khantisanghi) April 29, 2016

@shilpitewari @BDUTT @sardesairajdeep I got this DM , I can't reply coz i follow u and u don't follow me. AC hacked? pic.twitter.com/yP7xMTdrC4

— Kaustubh (@kaustubhsumbre) April 29, 2016

"I have temporarily disabled the account till they sort out the issue and tell me what has to be done. If a police complaint has to be filed, it will be filed,” Rajdeep further added, "Anyways this is a good break."

@shilpitewari pic.twitter.com/3oAvJB1L54

— ஓம் ஶ்ரீராம் (@pvsswamy) April 30, 2016

The journalist wrote in his last tweet that his account was hacked. His last tweet read, “How low will some people now stoop? Hack my account? Put out false messages? When will this end? Time to disable the account. Enough is enough.”

Sardesai has always been very active on Twitter. Irrespective of whether the messages were sent from the journalist's account or not, we should take our lessons. It's one thing to use social media platforms and quite another to nuance your usage and get the most out of the extraordinary reach and access it gives us to people in power and plain old democracy.

Sardesai is not the first journalist to quit the social media platform. Last year NDTV news anchor Ravish Kumar also took the same step, after he got trolled. In a statement, he said, “Why is it that all online abusers on Twitter have the same profile? Whenever I have bothered to check, the abuser has a profile proudly claiming that he’s a Sanghi, there is either a photo of Narendra Modi or that of Lord Rama with a bow, there is a talk of “Hindu Gaurav”. Now taking pride in your religion is great – but is abusing, spreading rumours, heaping baseless allegations, a "Gaurav ”?”