Social media isn’t new, and has gained prominence in the last few years, and this election almost all the candidates have used social media to their best. The official BJP twitter handle on Friday had a live video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacting with the party workers and voters in Varanasi as its pinned tweet. While, the twitter handle of Congress at the same time had the pinned tweet of Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s rally at Samastipur, Bihar. All the rallies by the PM, Congress President, Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadanvis and all the candidates have been putting their rallies live on social media apps like Facebook and Twitter. Apart from this, these candidates are using WhatsApp heavily, every candidate has at least hundreds of groups in his or her constituency. Political experts say that in future it is possible that online campaign will take over the current campaign of door to door and rallies at least in the urban areas.
Former Mumbai Congress President, and Congress candidate from Mumbai North West, Sanjay Nirupam says he is using social media for reaching out to people heavily. “Almost 90 per cent of the population uses social media, and are on Facebook, even maids and auto rickshawallahs are on Facebook and WhatsApp, then why not reach them via these medium too. At the end what matter is hard work and while door to door campaigning, meeting the voters, holding rally is very important, the reach on social media is a plus to reach the voters.”
Nirupam is very active on Twitter and keeps on updating where all is he holding meetings. The same case is with BJP candidate from Mumbai North East : Manoj Kotak. Kotak says that online medium is a good tool to reach voters. “Party workers who are with me while campaigning use social media and keep posting videos about my rallies online. It reaches a lot of people, and I do think in future, social media will play a vital role when it comes to reaching out the voters.”
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The MNS may not be contesting the elections this time, but Raj Thackeray’s speeches that he delivers at mammoth rallies, are heavily circulated on social media. He has found another audience on social media who keep forwarding the videos that he shows during his rallies with the tag line ‘Lav re toh video’ (Put on the video). There are memes that are forwarded using this tag line and are very popular too.
Anurag Chaturvedi, a political expert and former editor, says that this is the first election where social media is being used heavily “The first thing that a candidate does is creates several WhatsApp group in the constituency and has his men as admin, via this one gets to know how the voters in the constituency are reacting and also helps them to reach their vote base. Social media unlike TV or print is a two way communication medium which people prefer. There’s one more thing, that the messages on social media are uncensored and many a times the fake messages reach a lot of people. But social media which is used by the youth for political discourse has gained a lot of ground and in future at least in urban areas, social media will take over the door to door campaign and rallies for sure.”