Role of Social Media in Indian Politics | Political Campaigns
Keywords:- Political Campaign, Politics, Advertisement, Parties, Voters, Youth
Author: Nikhat Parveen
Introduction
The emergence of social media offers voice to normal people that are voiceless and fractured, which is negligible in orthodox and thought media. The good growth of social media is thanks to teenagers as they devote most of their time to social media. It is for everybody such as political parties who are cognizant of this and are attempting to influence the youngsters. Within the 2019 elections, our country had a hundred thirty million voters for the primary time. It includes over fifteen million voters between the ages of 18 and 19.
Political parties, with the assistance of social media, are able to get information concerning the likes and dislikes of voters. They can manipulate them further, particularly Swing Voters, whose opinions may be modified by manipulating information. Political parties and politicians have started victimising social media for communication and electioneering functions to influence voters. It thereby, saves time, cash and resources by giving them a wider audience for interaction.
Political Campaigns and Social Media
Political campaigns aren’t simply confined to buttons and banners for politicians to achieve their voters. The new political showground is choked with infomercials, advertisements, weblog posts, and lakhs of tweets, Instagram posts, Facebook posts and so forth. Politicians are currently ready to incessantly demonstrate their message through endless commercials. They also gauge their communication by viewing direct responses to their actions on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Presently the platform connecting professionals is utilised by the parties to propagate themselves. Social media creates an innovative political conversation. The power of political electronic messaging is quarantined from the mass media model and firmly placed into the peer-to-peer, public dialogue.
The establishment of social media has allowed unequalled direction and arrangement of the ‘aam aadmi’ for expressing political opinions. The positive development of social media development has been that the youth is speaking concerning political issues. Rest, the political discussions were forced solely on people who browse newspapers and view news channels. They also included the public who contributed to discussions at ‘nukkad’ of a village or clubs. However, currently, social interaction has created the youth of Bharat to debate political issues. They use the time to analyse and discuss politics. They now have their views on the happenings of political events and additionally, influence the executive call making. Social media evolution within the Indian political area is factual, perceptible and fast-tracking. However, it does not usher in huge changes instantaneously. Still, it plays an important role in spreading political awareness in a developing country like India.
USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN ELECTION POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS AND COMMISSION OF INDIA’S (ECI) SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY
Instructions of the Commission regarding the use of Social Media in the Election movement include:
Instructions of the Commission
The Commission has issued elaborate pointers concerning social media on the twenty-fifth Gregorian calendar month 2013. It instructs candidates to furnish details of their social media accounts at the time of filing nominations. The Commission has additionally brought the social media sites underneath the orbit of pre-certification. The Commission has educated that candidates and political parties shall embody all expenditure on campaigning. This will be done together with expenditure on advertisements on social media into their election expenditure account.
The commission has further stated that any political content within the sort of messages/comments/photos/videos posted/uploaded on the blogs/self-accounts on websites/ social media won’t be thought of as political advertisements and wouldn’t need pre-certification. However, advertisements printed in e-newspaper shall require pre-certification by the involved authority.
Concerns and Solutions
The Commission is determined to reinforce its interaction and involvement with all the stakeholders within the electoral processes. This will be done by inducting the utilisation of social media at the State in addition to the District level. All Chief Electoral Officers and also the District Electoral Officers currently have their official accounts on varied social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. This is for the purpose of establishing a more interactive system.
The CEOs have originated Social Media Cells to professionally handle these Social Media accounts and circularise all the required information. There are people who promptly respond to the complaints received on these platforms. At the ECI level, a Social Media Cell is additionally originated to circularise all election-related data to numerous stakeholders. It will also observe the performance of the State/ UTs and District and guide and train them to maximise the utilisation of Social Media. It will thereby, help in creating it additionally interactive and fascinating for the overall public. The Social Media Cell also closely monitors the net for election-related news and developments and often reports to the Commission.
Recent Researches
In today’s digital era, social media is a highly useful tool to communicate information. The present study, researchers will examine the role of social media in political campaigning management. In the 2014 General elections, social media played a key role in influencing voters’ behaviour. From 2014 onward, many start-ups related to social media came into the picture. Due to this various job opportunities got opened for the younger generation.
Conclusion
Politicians use various social media platforms to communicate with their voters and to call them either for protest or to vote. So, the use of Web 2.0 technologies has made it easy to get connected with a wide range of audiences to political parties, social activists, and individual leaders. There are various impacts that social media has on campaigns in the conventional sense. It helps in expanding the reach of their message to more voters and often youth voters. Social media activities can be used to predict the outcome of elections.
However, nowadays many companies are trying to use the data which is available from social media sites. Different platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and other sites are used to predict election outcomes. It is generally assumed that people visit these social media platforms with their ideas and thoughts regarding their political leaders during the election period. Through careful and qualitative content and structural network analysis these platforms will provide similar results to conventional election polling.
These positive and negative views of technology’s impact on political attitudes are often related. In 10 of the 11 surveyed, there are people who believe technology has made people more informed. They are also more likely than others to say technology has also made people easier to manipulate.
Similarly, there are civilians who say that technology has made people more accepting of diverse viewpoints. These people are simultaneously more likely to say it has made people more divided in their political opinions.
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This write-up is edited by Somprikta Banerjee
