India has to Build an Institutional

Framework to Monitor Social Media to

Secure Its Democracy
This article will briefly analyze the recent trend of election campaigns on social media and
the associated threat to democracy.

Arun Tteja P

Media plays a vital role in a democracy; democracy, informing the public about political issues
and acting as a watchdog against abuses of power abuse. During election campaigns election
campaigns, the same media provides information and analyzes about the political parties parties’
programs, policies, candidates, and performance. After the introduction of the internet, social
media has taken some of the latters latter’s role transforming politics in India and of course,
globally. The transformation was rapid and has taken the paly of politics to the pocket of every
citizen. It enormously impacted the candidates' campaign for there election. Social media allows
politicians and political parties to establish a platform connecting directly with people across the
country at a reduced cost and greater reach than traditional media. It is not simply the next in a
line of communications technologies; it has changed everyday activities and connected people in
a manner never possible inducing constant socio-technical iterative changes with-in the societies [
CITATION Cal19 \l 1033 ].

THE ADOPTION OF CYBER TACTICS BY POLITICAL PARTIES IN

INDIA
Let us take the example of the Bhartiya Janata Party's: much of this party’s success in Indian
politics can be attributed to its campaigning strategy, where in wherein media platforms have
been given prime importance. BJP is a pioneer in the Indian election scene to have taken to
media platforms for election campaigns and propaganda of their manifesto. While other
parties where were still relying on traditional methods of conducting rallies and public talks,
the BJP party workers were mobilizing large groups of youth through an interactive and
almost omnipresent media presence. Speaking from experience as a campaign manager for a
regional party in India, i I witnessed this new style of campaigning and acknowledged the
futuristic mindset adopted by the campaign. One could characterize their strategy as that
which centers primarily on social media presence

Once the trend of 'social media election' began in India, regional parties also realized it’s
strength and embraced it into there strategies. In the Bihar assembly elections of 2015, that
were fought bitterly on the ground, political leaders also attempted to capture a social media
windfall in their campaigns with Twitter hash tags hashtags and Facebook trends, despite a
limited internet reach among the people of Bihar. One such example is Nitish Kumar's Social
Media 'Bihar@2025', which is the first of its kind by any chief minister of Bihar [ CITATION
Kha15 \l 1033 ]. During the poll season and adopted a Q&A session on twitter called
"AskNitish" which he later extended to Facebook. Simultaneously, the BJP took a systematic
approach and conducted constituency-wise social media mapping of the state, attempting to
repeat its Lok Sabha poll success. The communication department of the saffron party
focused on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp to enhance its reach. According to Statista, these
are the most used social media platforms in India as per 2019 [ CITATION Sta20 \l 1033 ]. Ever
since, there has only been an upward trend in the use of social media such as Twitter and
Facebook by political leaders to advertise their campaign commitments and ask for support.
During the recent general elections (General elections 2019) also dubbed ‘Internet Election'
seems to have taken a grand from where the parties who missed out its potential in the
previous general election (2014) have set out to target the citizens. Indian National Congress
(“INC”) president Rahul Gandhi was one of the first leaders who took to the Facebook and
invited people to fill out a customized form to improve the party's reach. The INC also
employed Whatsapp as a platform for quicker reach to their supporters and potentially
supporters. Then newly appointed general secretary of the party, Priyanka Gandhi unveiled
her

However, the BJP has continued to be formidable be formidable champion in the digital space with
a robust organizational capacity providing effective cyber campaigning. For example the popular
chowkidar hashtag that began as a rebuttal between the two major rivals (BJP & INC) gained
tremendous buzz with retweets and mentions over the millions of handles of common citizens. As
they say even bad publicity, is good publicity. Such novel tactics and campaigning strategies, have
not been seen widely seen in the previous elections and from 2019, it has become a new normal. It
appears as if India is adopting the American style of campaign

THREAT TO THE DEMOCRACY

Even though social media is a great tool for campaigning, the present state of online
advertising and marketing faces a huge threat due to fake news and tailored content to sway
voters. Politics and media share a complex synergistic relationship and must be looked at in
juxtaposition to one another. Media, politics, and elections are intertwined together, and
social media platforms have become the essential ground for the discussion of political
narratives and discourse. Therefore there is a drastic need to exercise caution while engaging
in a political dialogue on social media.One progressive step towards reducing unintended
consequences from the use of the social media during the elections, is the declaration by
Election Commission (EC). It demands a model code of conduct and the pre-certified
political advertisement rules to be applied to social media as well. These platforms will also
have to follow a "silence period" along with all other basic codes of conduct which is 48
hours before the polling day1. further in recognizing the probable harm of social media, EC
has also asked the contesting candidates to submit their social media handle details (if any) at
the time of filing the nominations. One of the most striking features is however the
mandatory requirement to disclose the social media expenditure during campaigns in the
election budget of the parties [ CITATION Ele19 \l 1033 ].The digitalization under various
government schemes such as Skill India has brought the internet to the fingertips of the large mass
of citizens providing them greater access than ever before. However; the caste-based vote bank,
primordial loyalties would make the available abundance of online information a reason for biased
grouping. Political science scholar, Alex Burns calls this situation as filter bubbles [ CITATION Bur19 \l
1033 ]. Irrespective of truth, rationale, people tend to form groups in accordance with their existing
biased beliefs making the existing vagaries and vicissitudes of society much harsher. Albeit the EC

1
Economic Times. (2019, March 11). Model code & political ad rules will apply to social media too.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabha/india/model-code-political-ad-rules-will-
apply-to-social-media-too/articleshow/68350634.cms?from=mdr
recognized the impact of social media, it is very far from establishing an institutional framework to
curb the usage of filter bubbles during the elections. Data protection laws are new to the state of
India, but it is just a tip of the digital technologies regulation. Emerging technologies like ai would
need a much more comprehensive and robust institutional governance framework which will itself
need to be vetted for institutional bias, data protection, transparency and more.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burns, A. (2019, November 29). Filter bubble. Internet Policy Review, 8(4), 1-14. Retrieved from
https://policyreview.info/node/1426/pdf

Calzada, I. (2019). Deciphering Smart City Citizenship: The Techno-Politics of Data and Urban Co-
operative Platforms . IEV (Revista Internacional de Estudios Vascos/International Journal on
Basque Studies) 63, no. 1, 42-81.

Khanna, P. (2015, July 27). Nitish Kumar takes the Bihar poll battle online. Retrieved June 20, 2019,
from LiveMint: https://www.livemint.com/Politics/VVOe2eoWDgpFkGSySDrlKL/Nitish-
Kumar-takes-the-Bihar-poll-battle-online.html

Statista. (2020, February). Social network penetration India Q3 2019. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from
https://www.statista.com/statistics/284436/india-social-network-penetration/

Election Commission of India. (2019, April 4). https://eci.gov.in/files/file/9757-compendium-of-

instructions-on-media-related-matters/. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from
https://eci.gov.in/files/file/9757-compendium-of-instructions-on-media-related-matters/