Essentially, our Lord Commander is only quitting social media for a day because he wants to do this fun new publicity stunt that his team probably stole from Buzzfeed's Instagram takeovers. Probably.

But between the time that the first tweet went out from the Twitter handle of Supreme Leader and the next one appeared, there was a time gap of about 16 hours.

Now, 16 hours was enough for our TV channels to have an absolute field day. Starved and hungry for something to praise our dear Lord Commander after a week of dodging questions on his behalf, the media jumped at this opportunity. It was like they began frantically browsing through Twitter for possible theories, and then based entire primetime debates on what they found — or didn’t find. For our news anchors, the tweets above turned out to be as inspiring as a poem by Rupi Kaur.

Because, hey, why tell reporters to follow up on a story before airing something when the Twitter junta is doing it for you, eh?

All you need to do is flash those tweets, assemble some guests to spout cowshit, and boom! Easy and cheap!

Let’s debate!

The Nation Knew in Five Minutes

Arnab Goswami started his primetime debate on Republic TV by pointing out that PM Modi had published a sensational tweet just five minutes ago. "So why did he do it? Why is he quitting social media? Why?"

Immediately, his “political editor”, Aishwarya Kapoor of the Jamia shooting fame , was ready with Abhishek Kapoor, their “executive editor”, to bounce around some theories. Abhishek straight up told everyone, “The safest conclusion would be that he’s so pained by social media being used to spread rumors and peddle mistruths.”

This was in reference to the Delhi riots, of course, in which 45 people have died.

This tweet story was so high-priority for Arnab that you could hear him instructing someone to drop everything else, get the guests to talk about it, and run the hashtag #PMtweet. And then minutes later, you could literally see panelists rushing into the studio from behind him.

Basically, within minutes of Modi's tweet, panelists were ready to debate — without any context of why he posted the tweet, what it meant, or anything at all, really.

The mind boggles sometimes at how this whole news entertainment phenomenon just unfurls.

Anyway, Arnab’s theory was, “The PM is making a statement here, that ‘I don’t need social media. I can live off social media but if my being on social media is only going to encourage social media to lie more about the communal situation, and lie about not taking action…having double standards about asking for accountability’ — then I think everybody in the country stands with the prime minister.”

But no, he didn’t stop there because Arnab's brainwaves emerge faster than Chacha Chaudhary's brain can formulate a thought.

He said Modi leaving social media completely destroys the credibility of all these social media companies. Some panelists chimed in and said it even vindicates Arnab’s own stand of personally keeping away from social media completely.

Because when you get a chance to casually praise the Loudspeaker-in-Chief, you must take it!

By the way, Arnab — who is the be-all and end-all of a news organisation called Republic Network —has a very active social media team that uses all platforms to promote their content. All news organisations do that and they definitely benefit from it. So why didn’t Republic just put out an official tweet saying they’re quitting social media too?

Evidently, in Arnab’s head, this is clearly the latest test of nationalism. A test that Republic TV clearly failed.

Taking this single line of argument, which went something like, “The prime minister had to quit social media to teach those blasted western power-controlled anti-India social media companies a lesson”, the entertainment slug-fest spiralled out of control.

Special mention goes to the most sensible person in the debate…Sambit Patra.Yep, Sambit “ oui oui pui pui ” Patra was actually sensible. He straight out told Arnab he has no clue about what is happening, hasn’t been briefed about the tweet, and since the PM has said, “will keep you all posted”, we should wait to see his explanation before commenting on it.

My reaction when I heard this can only be expressed in a GIF...