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Impact Of Social Media In The Delhi Elections

Categories: South Asia, India, Citizen Media, Elections, Freedom of Speech, Good News, Governance, Ideas, Media & Journalism, Politics, Technology
Voters fingers are stained after casting their vote to prevent fraud. Image by Louise Dowse. Copyright Demotix (4/12/2013) [1]

Voters fingers are stained after casting their vote to prevent fraud. Image by Louise Dowse. Copyright Demotix (4/12/2013)

Prior to the Delhi Legislative Assembly election [2] (4 December 2013) the Delhi Election Commission vowed to monitor the social media [3] for political campaigns looking for breach of model code of conduct by the candidates. However the commission later said [4] that there were loopholes in monitoring and it is virtually “impossible” to keep track of so many conversations.

Nikhil Pahwa [5] at Medianama analyses the impact of social media on the recent Delhi elections:

What Social Media has done in these elections is that it brought out the vote. People may or may not have been influenced by the campaigns run by political parties, but the incessant debate, raising of issues, criticism, and the conversations, the fight and even the hate-commentary that ensued, led to there being a voter – at least in Delhi – that was more aware of the political atmosphere, more conscious that her vote matters, and more responsive to calls for getting out the vote.