Poll aspirants battle it out on social media

Ludhiana: Poll campaign for the Lok Sabha elections is yet to pick up on ground but the war on social media seems to be boiling up among ticket aspirants. They are doing all they can to grab attention and get more followers.
Having made a mark for live streaming the ‘exposures’ against corruption and irregularities in varioud departments, Lok Insaaf Party chief who was recently declared as the People Democratic Alliance (PDA) candidate, Simarjit Singh Bains leads amongst the MP aspirants, with as many as 9.42 lakh followers, leaving behind his rival Congress MP Ravneet Singh Bittu, who has 1.13 lakhs followers on the FB page.

Though on twitter it’s Bittu who leads amongst the contenders with as many as 17,5 00 followers on his official Twitter account while Simarjit Bains lags behind with 4,296 followers.

Congress MP Bittu, who has been accused of losing connect with the masses, can be seen sharing regular posts posts related to his public interactions and the ‘development work’. He is also posting about the upcoming political meetings and other events. Bains goes live on FB whenever he is out on some sting operations and taking on some government officials for irregularities or deriliction of duty. Dhillon and Maheshinder who are also in the race too have started sharing posts related to their party activities. Recently, Dhillon too was seen in a live stream on his FB page, throwing a challenge to Bittu for an open debate on the ‘lack of development in his tenure’.

City based cyber expert Jaskirat Singh said, “It has become a common trend amongst the leaders and politicians to show popularity on social media but it’s difficult to say whether the likes received on the posts are genuine or not. In the past a few cases were reported where politicians were caught on wrong foot for getting fake likes on their social media accounts to show their popularity.”