Ola Scooter Is Crushing Customer Complaints Via Social Media Trolls? Here Is The Shocking Discovery!
Ola Electric has reportedly been using a network of Twitter accounts to counter criticism and portray a falsely positive picture for the brand online.
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Shady Campaign
Mint conducted an investigation and found more than 50 such Twitter handles.
Apparently they are synchronized and work together to trend other topics or promote other brands.
This implies that they are either digital media agency accounts or freelance networks that work for multiple agencies.
How It Began
Some of these accounts targeted a user, Balwant Singh who is a government employee in Guwahati whose son riding the brand’s scooter suffered a serious accident.
Singh blamed the accident on the scooter’s regenerative braking- instead of slowing at speed breakers, the scooter accelerated.
This caused the scooter to launch forward and skid.
His son ended up having fractures in the left hand and 16 stitches in the right.
The damage was so severe that he had to be flown from Guwahati to Mumbai for surgery to save his left hand from life long disability.
Insult To Injury
Singh shared footage of the incident and pictures of his son at the hospital on Twitter which set off an online battle.
The presumably fake accounts or bots tried to discredit the story, posting images that are supposed to be of the accidents that Singh tweeted.
One of such Twitter handles @princi_qween captioned the image- “Just letting you know since you don’t know, this is what airborne crashing looks like not 1 scratch on a panel”.
Another @ImAnkitss accused Singh of trying to “garner attention & money” and if his son is “hurt that bad you should take care of him rather than demanding things on Twitter.”
Why And How
These accounts work as shills for the company and do things such as like, retweet, and applaud tweets which portray a good picture of the company.
They try to amplify things like CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s vision for Make in India, the world’s largest two-wheeler manufacturing unit it has built, and its all-women workforce.
In response to all this the CEO Bhavish Aggarwal played the victim card, saying that his company has received one of the “biggest troll attacks in corporate India”.
He then said that his tweets get more replies than the Prime Minister’s account, despite having only a fraction of his followers.
He accused people of writing “all copy paste negative replies”.
Blaming The Victim
His company blamed the accident on reckless driving, citing the scooter’s trip information and claimed that the vehicle was not responsible.
They posted the cited telemetry data which backed their accusations on Twitter for everyone to see.
Singh issued a takedown notice and called their actions a breach of privacy agreement between him and the firm.
Ethics Out For A Toss
The shills also went after other users who criticized Ola Electric.
They tweet about product issues such as overheating, abrupt drop in battery performance and a glitch that makes the scooters enter reverse mode.
They received the expected treatment.
All of this seems to be the work of companies that help promote a brand image using multiple social media accounts and shun whoever dares to speak against it.
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