BENGALURU: Outrage over Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey holding a placard reading ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’ during his recent visit to India could have a long-term impact on Twitter, social media experts say. In the short term, though, there is not likely to be any significant churn in Twitter’s user base in India, they said.In fact, the microblogging platform was where hundreds of public figures and others expressed their shock and outrage after a photograph of the Twitter founder holding the controversial placard at aroundtable with journalists, activists and writers was tweeted by one of the participants on Sunday.“What a shame; How can people put such a hate poster and malign a community: @jack How can you as ceo of @twitter be party to this kind of hate? Shocking; this is @brahminphobia of the worst kind,” tweeted Mohandas Pai, former CFO at Infosys.Several Twitter users accused Dorsey of hate-mongering and hurting sentiments. Twitter has said the text on the placard that Dorsey held was “not a statement from Twitter”."Recently Twitter hosted a closed door discussion with a group of women journalists and change makers from India to better understand their experience using Twitter. One of the participants shared her experience as a Dalit woman and at the conclusion of the session, gifted a poster to Jack.The sentiments expressed on the poster do not reflect the views of Twitter as a company or Jack as the CEO, and we regret that this picture has detracted from an otherwise insightful trip to India.We are proud of the fact that Twitter is a platform where marginalised voices can be seen and heard, but we also have a public commitment to being apolitical. We realise that this photo may not accurately represent that commitment.Twitter is a global platform that serves a global, public conversation and elevates a diversity of views, ideas, and perspectives. When our executives travel, they meet with a range of public figures from around the world that represent the diversity of the conversation on our platform. This recent trip to India was no exception and Jack and Vijaya met with leaders across the political spectrum, and from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds."Experts said Twitter has to start cleaning up negativity on its platform, and Dorsey’s action does not help. “Usually there is no short-term impact from such instances; platforms have a high ecosystem lock-in, as we have seen with Facebook, whose founder was involved in numerous controversies,” said Yash Mishra, founder of social networking app VoxWeb. “However, in the long term, this impacts the company’s goodwill, and such issues can push users to a rival platform if one comes up.”Brand consultant Harish Bijoor said that a controversial post usually leads to more engagements on these platforms as more people are outraged. “In that respect, in the immediate short-term, this is good for Twitter. But Twitter needs to clean up negativity and cannot continue to be a spit-andrun platform,” he said.