BJP, Congress raise the pitch in online battle

BENGALURU: The BJP’s use of social media in the 2014 Lok Sabha election had shown political parties how effective use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook could bear fruit. Four years later, the online battle has made its way to Karnataka for the first time, and all three major parties claim that their strategies have worked best, although the JD(S) is clearly far behind the Congress and BJP.


Although there is no clear answer to whether or not such online propaganda help garner votes, parties say that ignoring it isn’t an option.

Harish Narasappa, founder, Daksh points out: “Social media is democratic with easy access to everybody and a level playing field. BJP had an early advantage but it is great to see other parties also catching up. My problem is with the misuse of social media through fake news. There must be self-regulation.”

A random search analysis shows that social media, whether it was Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, was dominated by the BJP and Congress. Twitter alone has seen over 8 lakh election related tweets, of which at least 10% to 12% came directly from the parties, say experts.

Whether it was CM Siddaramaiah’s counter tweet asking BJP’s P Muralidhar Rao that he must convey whatever he wishes to in Kannada or English if he wants a reply—which prompted the latter to do so—or BS Yeddyurappa’s series of attacks showing the government’s inaction so far as farmers suicides go, Twitter clearly dominated.

Facebook saw the second most action. Among the three CM candidates on Twitter, Yeddyurappa has the most followers (2.84 lakh) followed by Siddaramaiah (1.56 lakh) while HD Kumaraswamy (12,000) is far behind. But the state Congress’ official handle, with 4.67 lakh followers has more than BJP’s state handle (1.8 lakh).

On Facebook too Yeddyurappa has a clear lead with 17.7 lakh followers on his page compared to just 2.3 lakh for Kumaraswamy’s page and 1.85 lakh for Siddaramaiah’s.

The Congress’ social media campaign for these elections was run by a 52-member team, comprising IT professionals, graphic designers, content writers, technology experts and college students working as volunteers. In comparison, the BJP and JD(S) teams are much bigger.

The BJP has 40 members working for state-level strategies, besides 15 people for each district and 15 for each of the 224 constituencies. The JD(S) has formed six groups with over 30 people in each, besides the 70-member team working on overall strategy. Bhushan Nag, convener, social media, Congress, says: “The BJP may claim more followers but if you look at how the narratives panned out on social media, we have clearly won the perception battle as we did not indulge in personal attacks. Our focus, as instructed by the Congress leadership was restricted to our achievements.”

BJP social media cell’s state convener Balaji Srinivas says, “We still have a monopoly here. Congress is in its infancy. We had a special convention that saw over 5,000 people attend it and we picked a few from there and trained them on content generation, information gathering and distribution,” he said.

JD(S) IT cell head Naveen C, says that though a farmers’ party, the JD(S) is not weak on the IT front. “Ours is by far the best website. It saw 9 lakh new visits in the past six months,” he said.

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