Political parties, in this round of elections, are utilising social medium to its optimum to garner support. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are gaining popularity among the parties.
The past few months saw an increasing number of individuals, groups and fan pages of politicians and political parties. All political parties have a fan page on Facebook. The parties also have twitter accounts.
According to most politicians and parties, they are using social media to reach out to most of the voters. The parties have also employed their own teams for managing their fan pages.
“The good thing about social media is no cost involved and we have two volunteers who all working full time and who all are maintaining our page on social media and twitter,” said the Druk Chirwang Tshogpa’s president, Lily Wangchhuk.
Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa’s candidate, Lekey Dorji said his Party is quite active on social media. “We use social media to play clean politics and we believe in clean politics and we believe that it is very important for the parties to promote the party’s agenda parties ideology.”
The Parties are also able to advocate and share their ideologies directly to individuals through social media. Most said, as large portion of youth are active on Facebook, it is an apt forum to communicate with them.
“We are using by connecting all the followers by connecting with all our friends and then also sharing the various links and posts through the DPT friends so that in fact they have multiple effect down the line…” said Kinga Tshering, a candidate Druk Phuensum Tshogpa.
People’s Democratic Party’s candidate Damchoe Dorji said PDP is not association and that they emphasis a lot on the importance of social media in their campaign. “Social media will be part and parcel of over all media strategy. We will give a lot of importance on our party website. We all make full use of the TV, Radio and of course the print media and then in addition to all this we will also make use social media like FB, twitter and even blogs”.
According to ECB’s social media regulation, candidates and political parties shall be required to submit the addresses or links of the social media being used for election campaign to the Commission. It also states that, during the black-out period that is 48 hour period before poll and until the close of polls, no one shall publish, broadcast, or transmit any item that is of the nature of election campaign supporting or opposing any political party or candidate. The restrictions also apply to internet advertising.
However, an internet advertising published before and not altered during the 48-hour no-campaign period can remain posted as long as no further electronic distribution of that advertisement is carried out.
In the meantime, the parties also agreed that it is important for parties to maintain netiquettes on social media for fair elections.
Currently, there are over 84,000 facebook users and over 5000 twitter users in Bhutan. With large number of people engaged in social media, social media is likely to play a vital role in 2013 elections.
