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TusharSahjwani
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Electoral politics everywhere is being decisively affected by the social media platforms. Governments and political parties are adjusting to the immense power wielded through, not necessarily by, the companies. The platform companies are also belatedly, and largely involuntarily, catching up to the reality of their responsibility. In India next year another very important test of democracy's power to resist the bad effects of misinformation distributed through targeted political communication will occur; current assembly elections may be a trial run. Early indications are very worrisome.
Demonstration of Russian interference in US presidential elections in 2016, coupled with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, demonstrated the consequences of two crucial propositions about which every citizen of any democracy should be deeply concerned. First, targeted communications addressed to a person's phone based on a knowledge of their social media behaviour are extremely effective propaganda. Second, the platform and telecommunications companies' dual efforts to collect all the human race's behaviour and enable advertising and other "connections" based on that behavioural data are therefore being used to shape and deliver stimuli intended to change the results of elections.
In this country, political parties have been more candid in admitting the scale and nature of their use of social media than officials and parties in other democracies. Because the economics of paid advertising work less well in India than in richer democracies with much smaller populations, emphasis has fallen more sharply here on direct communications through the internet which are uncharged at both ends. Hence the importance of WhatsApp, which provides an infinite communications subsidy to political actors, and has therefore become the single most important new medium of political communication since the onset of television.