‘Politricks’ of opinion making on social media

With the social media becoming an important tool of information dissemination and any smartphone user is a prospective promoter, political parties are investing heavily in making sure that they use the medium to reach out to the right people. Thirty-five-year-old Alpana is a homemaker and also a member of the youth wing of a major national political party. She sends out messages every day to all the contacts on her mobile phone, as her job is to make sure that party-related WhatsApp messages reach as many people as possible.

Celebrities or people with a strong online presence are also pooled-in. In management terms, it is called the influencer marketing. An influencer is a person who has an impact on a community and whatever he/she says reaches a large number of people. Each political party has an IT Wing that zeroes in on the influencers, who in turn promote the ideology.

It could be a paid arrangement or the influencer may genuinely believe in the ideology. “The IT wing of any political party has separate teams to work at different levels. There is always someone designated to find loopholes in the Opposition strategy. Someone keenly listens to every word that the Opposition utters and fish for controversies.

The influencer reacts to the controversy and so does his/her wide fan following.

It only snowballs from there and here comes the role of the troll army who are just willing to join the bandwagon,” says social media expert and marketing consultant, Yaagneshwaran Ganesh.

It is a known fact there are thousands of fake profiles. Insiders say that IT wings tend to create multiple bogus accounts to get their messages out in bulk. When it comes to political parties, the only job of the IT wing is to propagate through social media. It is not a source of revenue.

“Our duty is to attract the content, which is in line with the party’s strategy. We decide on what kind of content has to be shared on each and every platform,” explains Jeyabalan RK, district president of a one of the leading political parties in the state.

Almost every state party has a team that works at different levels. One team works at the state level that forms the core group and passes on the information to volunteers at the district levels. Each district has 15-20 volunteers, to ensure that the information is disseminated to as many people as possible. This also includes posters, memes, forwards and videos. A team is responsible for the designing and presentation of every content.

Jeyabalan says that when it comes to state parties, the major one has at least 2,000 active members and adds, “When the trend started, most of the work was outsourced, so parties could not control everything. Now, every party has an inhouse team that controls every information, making it more authentic.”

Over the last two years, social networking website Facebook came under the spotlight in a major way during the US Presidential elections, when it was proven that fake news had influenced the verdicts. On further investigation, it was discovered that the viral angle to such unproven, falsified reports spread through status updates, videos and memes on popular fan pages, could pretty much make or break a political movement – as well as the image of a personality, or in some cases – even a social uprising.

In Tamil Nadu, the very concept of a ‘meme-maker’ was unheard of, until a few years ago with social media confined to posting pictures and updates of one’s personal life – but since 2014, the advent of fan pages initiated several into the ‘hobby’ as the growing number of likes and shares ended up boosting one’s ego. Today, with the meme scene as vibrant as ever, more and more creative minds are making it a business of sorts – and getting paid to influence everything from political campaigns to the box-office results of a movie. Should they be called ‘trolls’? Not necessarily, as these cyber armies promote or slander based on their personal agendas.

SreeGanesh, former admin of Chennai Memes say that they get such requests from political parties all the time – “Even in this business, we follow ethics of some kind – so we don’t endorse it.

But we have been offered a lot of money, and threats if we don’t accept it. Most of us come from decent backgrounds and have full-time jobs, so we have the ability to turn them down.”

However, not everyone does. With as much as Rs 2,500 paid for an update on a fan page with around 2,00,000 likes, it is easy money for many of them, most of whom are studying in college.

From comparing MK Stalin’s walk to Vadivelu’s comedic poses, and Tamilisai Soundararajan’s comments to Goundamani’s one-liners, these memes are

widely shared and circulated all over social media as well as on WhatsApp – much to the mirth of users. However, when do things go too far? “During the OPS-EPS merger, a friend of mine created a viral meme that didn’t go well with the AIADMK. His neighbours, who knew that it was him, shared the news – and the next day, the friend came home to find AIADMK party members sitting in his hall. It could have gotten serious, but they left him after a strict warning.

Similarly, another ‘arasiyal’ troll page that routinely opposed the DMK and Seeman was actually hacked by the party – and all the admins’ mobile numbers were sent to the Chennai City Police page. All of them switched off their numbers for a month and went underground,” recalls G Paranthaman, who helms another of these groups online.

He adds, “It started off with Ajith vs Vijay fan wars, but has become much more now. The BJP --and even our Prime Minister Narendra Modi --is the target of most of our work, but we did get nervous when a few were arrested up north for something similar. But then we heard that the Supreme Court ruled that meme-makers cannot be arrested anymore and were free to air their views. We heaved a sigh of relief. We turn down any money offered to us – our purpose is to purely promote a good social cause and to take down politicos who err in their jobs.”