Election Commission likely to UNLIKE Social Media

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  Sunday, 13 October 2013 12:50
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Influnce is the way to win elections. Up until 2014 it was about money and muscle and the media … but this time round it’s also about online persuasion. This has been brought to the notice of the Election Commission (EC) too. The EC is presently examining how to get social media within the purview of the model code of conduct for the coming elections. This is based on a complaint to the commission by a rights organization. They have cited the purchase of Facebook “likes” and paid tweets as methods of election campaign by some parties and candidates this time round. The organization seeks greater scrutiny of election expenses incurred on campaigning through social media/internet.

Meanwhile in political preparation kingdom a virtual war is on and the King of the ring for now is the BJP and Narendra Modi … Party wise the BJP page on facebook has 1.5 million plus likes, The Congress has been able to notch up only 3 lakh likes. On twitter Narendra Modi is king with over 2.5 million followers, he is ‘followed’ by Sashi Tharoor with 1.9 million followers and Manmohan Singh with 83 lakh followers . As for Rahul and Sonia Gandhi they are yet to open their account with the birdie

Many of the figures for Twitter and face book are really impressive. Leads one to the question are all of these followers real…. How do we know, there are many ways and even a app that can tell the follower from the fake. For 1 if it’s a ‘egghead avatar’ chances are that it’s a fake account … if the account has random characters like @asdfghk it is considered fake …Why would you wanna be a nameless faceless follower of a great politician. Besides this there are tools to detect ‘fake’ followers on the net.

Several online tools, like Twitter Audit and Socialbakers, provide an analysis of any given Twitter account, with the percentage of what they describe as ‘fake’, ‘inactive’ and ‘good’ followers. So the Election Comission have their work cut out. If there are many fake followers of a particular politician on social media they are most probably bought …that politicians account needs to be monitored.

Do you personally want to carry out the litmus test on the politician to check if he’s all about ‘follower or fake’ time to separate the red from the blue.

Do you have a view / suggestion on how to separate the political wheat from the chaff ….express them below…we love hearing from you

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