Why BJP's smart social media policy can't stem trolling

While you might not have been able to tell from the tone and language of the political dialogue online, the BJP has a fairly comprehensive social media policy in place, with sharp guidelines about online behaviour. The party website says, in a section about the office bearers of the social media department, “Office bearers are be expected to be “model” social media citizens so that their passionate followers are influenced by example on appropriate Social Media conduct.” But given the nature of the Feku-Pappu debate and the threshold of tolerance that the BJP, especially Narendra Modi’s support base, shows for his critics, one can safely say that the office bearers are not doing a great job of being ‘model’ citizens to ‘passionate followers’. [caption id=“attachment_1137585” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image.[/caption] In an interview to The Times of India, BJP IT cell’s president Arvind Gupta defends the party against allegations of fuelling a vapid troll culture on the Internet. He points out that there are 16 crore internet users in India, out of which 4-5 crore use the social media regularly. Therefore, it is impossible to keep a tab on the misuse of social media and people crossing all conceivable boundaries of decency while promoting the party and its leaders. However, he quickly puts in that the Congress is equally culpable for the same crime. Gupta is probably right in his defence. And many of his party’s ardent supporters have never bothered or managed to take a good read of the party’s social media policy, tucked away in one corner of the BJP’s official website. Warning against abusive behavior, the policy document clearly states: “Healthy debate on various issues is encouraged as it promotes understanding of various nuances and complexities of the respective issues. However, debate should ideally not become a ruse to unnecessarily tag people and / or result in behaviour  which can be construed as cyber bullying.” He goes on to say that the social media campaign of the BJP can’t be criticised if a minority of users resort to tasteless abuse. He says, " If there are 100 people out there discussing something, 20 of them may become abusive, but 60 to 70 people will also say something useful.  And we are deeply into crowd-sourcing, seeking inputs and feedback from the masses. We listen carefully." However, as Gupta points out, though the BJP might be employing technocrats and digital marketers (as opposed to Congress’ social media strategists) to run the social media campaign, the voices that swim out to the surface mostly always are the ones that speak in the same intolerant and abusive tone as that of trolls. However, like the recent Twitter outrage over writer Amitav Ghosh and UR Ananthamurthy shows, BJP’s pristine policy has little bearing on its ‘passionate’ supporters. While several Twitter users wondered aloud who Amitav Ghosh or Anathamurthy were, several others suggested they are trying to garner publicity/sell books by bad-mouthing Modi, will blatant disregard for their achievements. Because they had refused to vote for Narendra Modi, they were even labelled as Congress ‘stooges’. Following are a few tweets: 

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The problem with BJP’s social media ‘policy’ as is with the Congress’ is the fact that while an incredible amount of content is being pushed out on several platforms and an equally incredible number of debates are being spawned, in a space where self-moderation is not a valid idea, the parties employ no effort to either moderate or censor what their followers are doing. Given the sheer number of social media users, maybe to do so would be an uphill task. But at the very least, they should ensure that the people they choose to follow are not those who are the rabid, frothing at the mouth type. If they are really not in agreement with the kind of abuse these people mete out, they at to least need to distance themselves from them. While the ideas of censoring and free speech are mutually exclusive, if a party indeed wants to further its prospects with help from social media they have to indulge in some weeding and chopping. Otherwise, unless all voters who are also social media users develop an appetite for online, badly-worded rants, Twitter debates will lead to nothing more productive than Twitter bad blood.