 Ahead of the elections on September 12 for the Delhi University Students’ Union (Dusu), the Delhi University is gearing up to monitor the social media campaign and activities of students’ wings of various political parties to keep track of any violations of the Lyngdoh committee recommendations. For proper monitoring of the social media campaigns during the union polls, the university will set up a special committee to monitor social media and online campaigns on a daily basis. A report will be sent to the chief election officer for the Dusu election. “A team of senior DU officials will be helping the CEO’s team in its endeavour to monitor and check breaches of the model code of conduct recommended by the Lyngdoh committee. Photos and any content posted online against the spirit of the Lyngdoh committee will be considered as violations and authority will take action as per the rules,” said a DU official. However, the DU has admitted that it seems impossible to keep a check on each political activity on the Internet as Twitter handles and user IDs on public discussion forums could be changed easily. The university officials will directly monitor official posts by candidates and students’ wings on social media and will also depend on complaints by individuals to take action against the violations during election campaign. “For instance, on Facebook, you can restrict people from viewing your account. So we can only monitor what is there in the public domain,” said the DU official. For this purpose, a special team will be formed once the nomination process ends on September 5. Apart from social media, the special team will also monitor blogs and messages. Meanwhile, with several candidates making use of messenger apps such as WhatsApp and other messaging apps, the Delhi University is planning to rope in students to monitor them. A source in the university administration said that monitoring of messages is not possible they were sent to a specific audience, “so we are going to make students help identify messages which violate code of conduct described by the Lyngdoh committee.” As per the rules, the Delhi University can lodge a FIR against candidates or students’ wings found violating the election code of conduct or cancel the election if a candidate wins the election before the completion of inquiry. Source: The Asian Age, Image: flickr.com |
