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INDIAN (T)

Election Commission's challenge in the time of digital warfare

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Election Commission's challenge in the time of digital warfareWith a large part of the battle for Karnataka 2018 being fought from digital war-rooms, apprehension looms large over how the election authorities will track social media content and expenditure of each candidate and political party when the model code of conduct comes into force.

The number of assembly constituencies in Karnataka is 224. If each constituency has about 10 contestants, the number of candidates that the Election Commission has to monitor is 2,240. In addition, the online activity of political parties too is to be taken into consideration.

Even five years since it issued guidelines regarding the use of social media in poll campaigns, the EC has not come out with a module to track and make social media content accountable.

Political parties, which have been merrily using social media through sponsored advertisements, are clueless how content and expenditure will be monitored. The confusion is largely because the EC was keen on tracking promotional activity on social media by not attending the production and expenditure issues.

Balaji Srinivas, the convenor of the BJP’s social media cell, said that in the past elections the EC was only looking at promotion through SMS and IVRS (interactive voice response system). “But the use and reach of social media has moved beyond that. It involves production cost as many of the candidates and parties hire agencies to handle social media. We are not sure how the election authorities are going to monitor paid online campaigns through Facebook and other platforms and what are their expectations from us,” he said.

Srivatsa YB, the convener of the Congress party’s state social media cell, said: “Though social media guidelines were issued in 2013, we do not know how they are going to codify it. The EC should come out with clear-cut guidelines and specifications to calculate social media expenditure,” he said. While admitting that it will be extremely difficult to adhere to, Srivatsa said that once the guidelines are in place, the social media team will collate the data and follow to the guidelines.

Those in the election machinery too believe that monitoring social media will be a challenge. Particularly because of the contents hidden from the public domain. “Many of the social media activities which are not in the public view may not be tracked. It is hard to track the content that is available only for closed groups. Therefore, apart from training our officials on monitoring social media, we will also rely on the general public for tip-offs,” CEO Sanjiv Kumar said.

Apart from the expenditure on social media, the EC would keep a tab on the content that violates guidelines. “Asking votes in the name of religion, vicious campaign against a person, personal attacks carried out on social media are prohibited once the code of conduct is in force.”



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