EC panel suggests treating social media hashtags as political ads

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Twitter is a place for ‘highly-polarised political narratives’ and hence the hashtag trend on the social media platform should be treated as political advertisement during elections and must be subject to media certification and monitoring committee (MCMC) regulations of the Election Commission – an expert committee has suggested, The Times of India reported.

The expert panel, which was formed under the supervision of ex-IRS officer Harish Kumar, reviewed the poll expenditure limits as well as expenditure monitoring mechanisms in its report to the EC.

The report highlighted the need to create a separate social media monitoring cell to track politically driven ads during the elections and submit a report on it to the expenditure observer. This cell was recommended to be created in the district election officer’s (DEO) office.

DEO’s office must also be granted the authority to engage with “external consultants or software development firms to develop and deploy suitable social media monitoring solutions and build a dashboard to track the progress of action taken on the discovery of social media expenditure,” report suggested.

The expert committee mentioned of three key social media platforms which were engaging in political campaigns online – Google (Google Ads + YouTube), Facebook (including Instagram) and Twitter. With over 3.4 crore Twitter users in India, the expert committee felt, it is an important platform for expenditure monitoring.

Trending a hashtag requires enormous internet coordination and a pool of dedicated party workers or sympathizers who promote it and, as some say, set the narrative and mood of the elections. The committee asked for open tools like botometers, which can be used to keep an eye on Twitter accounts supporting a particular campaign hashtag.