Delhi polls: Election office gets ready to monitor social media

With Delhi Assembly election date nearing, the Chief Electoral Officer’s Office in Kashmere Gate is bustling with activity. This time however the office won’t just be dealing with holding elections but will also have to look at social media accounts of candidates. Where Delhi is concerned, elections take place on 4 December and the nomination process begins on 9 November. Given EC’s new guidelines, the candidates will have to declare their social media accounts while filing their nomination.

However, currently Form 26 which is the affidavit with the details of the candidate, doesn’t have a separate section for declaring social media accounts, at least on the website of the Delhi’s Chief electoral officer. When we asked Ankur Garg, who is the Chief Nodal Officer for the Model Code of Conduct in Delhi, about this and he said that the forms will be updated soon and that the column for social media would be added to the affidavit as well.

[caption id=“attachment_1217019” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The Election Commission of India issued guidelines on 25 October and has asked that candidates submit details of their original social media accounts (such as those on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc). AFP[/caption]

“We are yet to take a decision on whether to print completely new forms or to just add a new sub-section where candidates can declare social media accounts,” he said. However he confirmed that candidates will have to fill in a section with their social media account details once the nomination process begins.

Garg added that 10 media monitoring committees would be set up to look at ‘declared’ social media accounts and to ensure that the model code of conduct was not violated in the online space.

As far as monitoring of ads is concerned Garg said that the candidates and political parties will have to apply for pre-certification when releasing ads online to ensure that they do not violate the model code of conduct. “We have circulated an order with regard to the issue of pre-certification for ads to all political parties,” he said. All advertisements on the internet will be part of the same guidelines that are already in place for the ones on electronic media.

Ads for now, however, include all paid for content on social media and websites. The guidelines are silent on memes, etc, which parties can always claim to have not created and are often free on the web.

The Election Commission of India issued guidelines on 25 October and has asked that candidates submit details of their original social media accounts (such as those on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc) and give detailed account of how much they spend on social media.

However when it comes to the issue of monitoring of social media content, the task won’t be that easy. Garg admitted that while there would be teams to monitor official and declared social media accounts of the candidates, it would be impossible for the office to monitor every single social media account.

“If someone say creates a fake account and the candidate disowns it and says that he has no clue who created it, then we are unlikely to monitor such an account. Given the size of the internet, when it comes to non-official accounts we are likely to take action only if we receive a complaint,” Garg told us.

BJP’s Sanjay Kaul (also a member of BJP’s Delhi Executive Committee) told us in an email response that where nominations were concerned, the BJP would ensure that the new guidelines are complied with. “In normal course also all applications and nominations are vetted by a legal team before submissions to ensure compliance. Similar diligence will be undertaken to ensure that candidates fulfil all guidelines on social media prescribed by the EC,” he wrote.

Where the effectiveness of the guidelines was concerned, he too admitted that it was a difficult task for EC. “I think the commission realises the potential for surrogate use of the medium under various aliases or indeed outsourced support groups. Frankly that remains a very difficult area to control so the challenge can at best be met half way or less through the present guidelines,” he says.

AAP’s Dilip Pandey who handles social media for the party said that the party had received the guidelines from the Delhi election office and that they are much needed measure. He too felt the EC will need to do more to monitor social media. “The EC still doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure or technology to monitor content written by others who may not belong to political parties. Hopefully it will come in time,” he said.

We had also noted earlier that considering how the internet works, it would still require more sophisticated tools to figure out exactly who is running what social media accounts. While monitoring teams are important to look at official accounts, given that EC’s guidelines don’t consider content that is posted by the others which may be of a political nature, social media might still well be a political wild west in India.