Social media war rooms hold sway over traditional campaigning

​Hyderabad: Over a 100 tech-savvy Congress workers and volunteers are making all-out efforts at their office to bring the People’s Front closer to voters. Besides the groundwork by Kutami’s top leaders, this army of youth has been engrossed in online research and coming up with astonishing and creative ideas to influence the voters. Since this information is released on social media platforms and goes viral to challenge the opponent, it is named as ‘War Room’.

Earlier, political parties use to take up door-to-door campaign to reach out to voters. Even though the Bharatiya Janata Party has gained maximum mileage by engaging social media in the 2014 general elections and Assembly elections which held after that, the Congress realised the fact a bit late and decided to push its agenda on the social media platforms.

Even though parties are conducting public meetings, campaigning through vehicle announcements and working in various forms, the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) this time is leaving no stone unturned in formulising the method for garnering maximum support through social media. By obtaining a digital way of campaigning through social media, they have come with the new concept of war room in the city from where it intends to fight the elections and to work towards strategies for winning them. Mehroz Khan, member of All India Congress Committee (AICC), in-charge of a war room, said the TPCC has started the research to understand the Telangana demography, political development for the last six months and came up with a centralised war room, supported by AICC.

Informing that a tool kit is provided to every candidate, Khan further explains that the team working on this project has done quantitative and qualitative analysis and understood each booth, status of the party, political scenario and social issues and collected the information needed. The team is closely working and monitoring the candidates and will be guiding the candidates by providing a toolkit and necessary information.
“A toolkit consists of Assembly maps, elections data, contact details and outreach programme. Booth level information like strength of voters is also provided to speak during the elections and press meets,” Khan added.

“In this war room, over 100 people are working 24x7 and will be monitoring the entire content on social media and manufacturing, designing and developing various methods like cartoons, pamphlets, posters and photographs for elections. Till now we have reached out to 1,80,000 of people in Telangana. The weekly viewers and shares get increased as we are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc. We are also receiving a positive feedback from the public as our content is based on facts, which remains authentic. Other political parties also use social media, but they have fake followers and viewership done by boosting a page,” said Deepak John, in-charge of social media, TPCC.

According to him, there were instances of threatening from the other side. Recently one of the crew members was also booked under a false case. “It is not an easy job as some of those working with us were also beaten up by the workers of opposition,” he said accusing the other political party.