With just a week left for civic elections, candidates kick up a social media storm, flooding cyber space with tweets, posts and videos to reach maximum voters
BMC Election: This is political parties' new way to get in your good books!
Representation pic
Just about a week is left for the municipal elections, and door-to-door campaigning notwithstanding, the country’s richest civic body is witnessing a high-voltage campaign on social media - 20,000 tweets, 10,000 Facebook posts and 500-odd video clips pertaining to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) were uploaded in just one day, Sunday.
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The election is on February 21 and counting will be done on February 23. Besides rallies, road shows, door-to-door campaigning, almost every political party is taking to social media to reach the maximum number of voters.
Social storm
Data analysis of Trendsmap.com - a website showing top trending topics on social media - has seen a sudden rise in BMC election-related tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts and video uploads.
According to the data, the Shiv Sena, BJP and Congress have been on Twitter non-stop to promote their political agenda, targeting each other over corruption and scams.
On Sunday, about 2,700 tweets were put up regarding BMC - 1,400 of #BMC and 1,300 of #BMCPOLLS.
The total number of tweets also include the hashtags used by political parties to wow voters - 1,800 of #BJP4Mumbai, 1,300 of Shiv Sena and 3300-odd from Sena’s official Twitter handle.
A member of Sena’s social media cell said, “The online platform has given us an extra hand to talk about our party’s good work and expose others’ lies and fake promises.”
Covering all platforms
Several candidates and party leaders are also using Facebook Live to interact with voters, the two biggies among them being Samajwadi Party corporator Rais Shaikh and BJP city president Ashish Shelar.
Pictures and videos on Instagram too are a rage among parties at the moment, all of them using every means and tool at hand to promote themselves and reach out to voters.
Commission on alert
The State Election Commission is keeping a close watch on candidates’ social media handles to check for any violation of the model code of conduct, or any instance of influencing voters.
An official from BMC’s election department said, “We are tracking social media handles of candidates at random. If there is any complaint about any violation of the code of conduct, we will investigate it.”
State Election Commissioner JS Saharia was not available for comment.
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