JEMTEC

Social media has now become an inevitable part of the political discourse in India. The entire national, as well as regional, political parties and leaders have established a social media presence and significant follower base. For the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, the Election Commission has issued a demarche to political parties on the use of social media for campaigning. The polling body said it will closely monitor any content that is aimed at vitiating conduct of elections or has the potential to disturb social harmony. In fact, this is the first time that social media giants Facebook, Twitter and Google have confirmed their willingness to work with the EC to uphold the integrity of political campaigns on their respective platforms. The demarche included the following postulates: 1. The EC has broadly identified five types of social media platforms – a) Collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia) b) Blogs and micro-blogs (e.g. Twitter) c) Content communities (e.g.