India's First Home-grown Social Media Platform Will Be Ready Very Soon. Thanks to Facebook! The invitation was so tempting that even the Chief Digital Officer of Mahindra Group Jaspreet Bindra also pitched his startup idea to his boss, Anand Mahindra on his tweet
By Komal Nathani •
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In the wake of Facebook's data breach controversy, the Indian billionaire Anand Mahindra expressed his willingness to fund a social media platform built out of India. The Chairman of Mahindra Group took to twitter sharing his grief over the broken trust of users by Facebook. He also said he'll be happy to seed fund the startups which are building a secured social media platform.
Here's a glimpse of tweet:
Beginning to wonder if it's time to consider having our own social networking company that is very widely owned&professionally managed&willingly regulated.Any relevant Indian start-ups out there?If any young teams have such plans I'd like to see if I can assist with seed capital pic.twitter.com/nBSkQk0hCp
— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) March 26, 2018
Mahindra's tweet caught a massive traction from startups which are building social media platform. A lot of entrepreneurs started pitching to the tech honcho on the comments section for the support. The invitation was so tempting that even the Chief Digital Officer of Mahindra Group Jaspreet Bindra also pitched his startup idea to his boss, Anand Mahindra on his tweet.
Check out the tweet here:
To say I'm overwhelmed by the responses to my call for social network startup proposals would be an understatement! @j_bindra & I have our work cut out for us..The good thing is that it's clear there's an explosion in entrepreneurial energies in this country.Let the games begin!
— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) March 28, 2018
Mahindra is the leading industrialist of India, whose empire spans from cars to IT to real estate. His tweet got the instant like from Minister of Information and Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad who had earlier warned the Facebook of taking "stringent action" if any attempt was made by them to influence the electoral process in India.
The Indian IT Minister RS Prasad replied on a tweet appreciating the initiative of Anand Mahindra for seed funding India's very own social media platform.
According to media reports, this is not the first time that Mahindra has taken his interests to invest in on projects on Twitter. Just last month, he tweeted about acquiring the property of a fugitive jeweler Nirav Modi in Mumbai, to turn it into a music hub.
The comments of the leading industrialist have come at a time when there is a global outrage all across the world on the users' data breach. The data mining firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of illegally harvesting the data of 50 million users from Facebook which was allegedly used in political campaigns in 2016 US elections.
India has the world's highest number of Facebook users with 241 million active members, according to a report published last June by Amsterdam-based firm The Next Web.
While giving testimony in front of UK lawmakers, the whistleblower and the ex-employee of The Cambridge Analytica Christopher Wylie had even spoken on the India link with the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Wylie also made the startling revelations over Congress being a client of Cambridge Analytica in the past for the regional elections.
On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg who earlier refused to testify in front of British lawmakers has now accepted to give his testimony before Congress about the social network's data privacy scandal.
