The Election Commission in the state of Karnataka has picked six college students with experience to identify social media violations.
The commission imparted a month’s training to them prior to the enforcement of the poll code. The millennials will be tasked to identify trending topics and posts with specific keywords said KG Jagadish, additional chief electoral officer.
The commission has also employed web crawlers which come as a software that browses websites and index them.
The current elections will be the first polls where in EC has included social media under the umbrella of poll code. The commission has also collaborated with social media platforms along with other third parties.
‘’Broadly, a three-fold method is being followed to monitor social media: external vigilance by the commission’s monitoring committees at the state and district-levels; internal vigilance by the media platforms themselves; and reportage of violations by the general public,’’ said Sanjiv Kumar, Chief Electoral Officer for Karnataka.
“Their internal surveillance is much better than ours because they have better search engines. We will not be in a position to see all the activity on the platform,’’ added Kumar.
