The Country heads of six social media platforms are scheduled to meet the Election Commission of India (ECI) to discuss strategies to curb the circulation of fake news, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.
The meeting between the ECI officials and the heads of 6 social media platforms, Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Twitter, Sharechat and Google, is scheduled on the 19th of March.
During the meeting, the ECI will lay out the main agenda of the meeting, which revolves around the appropriate use of all the social media platforms. The other points to be discussed in the meeting include the ‘evolving mechanism by the social media platforms to prevent abuse on their platforms’ and ‘pre certification of all political advertisement on social media platforms by the Media Certification & Monitoring Committee (MCMC) of the Election Commission.’
After this move, any political campaign to be carried out on social media platforms would need the approval of the MCMC.
The EC also released the Model Code of Conduct (MCC,) a set of guidelines which every political party needs to follow until the results of the elections are declared.
The EC also guided all the social media heads across India to monitor the activities on their respective social media platforms.
During the elections, the misuse of social media platforms to abuse the opposition political parties is quite common.
Political parties tend to influence people by defaming other parties on several social media platforms.
The Lok Sabha elections are scheduled from the 11th of April to the 19th of May 2019 and the major parties contesting are the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP.)
The results of the elections will be declared on the 23rd of May 2019.
Stay tuned for further updates about the Lok Sabha elections.
