“The entire social media space is polluted. If we have environmental pollution outside, equally serious social media pollution we have inside. It needs anti-pollution measures,”the CEC added.
Hinting at ‘business interests’, he also red flagged the algorithms reinforcing distorted views and even false narratives on the social media platforms without any checks.
“It is not enough to leave it to fact checkers to detect it. It is like allowing easily detectable fake to pass through and then leave it to organizations at receiving end, like the EMBs, to engage fact checkers and rescue themselves and the electoral process. Business interest appears to be at work here. It is like First spreading disease and then selling medicines. The casualty is a fair election process and purity of democracy”, the CEC added underlining that only by sustaining democracy is freedom of speech guaranteed.
At their end, the EMBs have decided to set up a working group on the issue, the CEC said.Kumar further highlighted instances of certain ‘democracy index’ rating ‘discrediting elections’ on the basis of some media reports and social media conversations. He proposed instead an “Election Integrity Index” either in addition to Democracy Index or a separate index within Democracy index with pre-defined weightage for greater objectivity.The CEC also made special mention of ‘revolutionary’ technology based innovations such as biometric authentication to check voter impersonation and the idea of ‘remote voting’. Kumar said both ideas- where ECI has also done considerable homework- show much promises but agreed that they must be accompanied by ‘foolproof secrecy and security of voting’ and mor importantly, any electoral reform has to be anchored by ‘political consensus’.
