KOLKATA: The ruling Trinamool Congress and opposition BJP in West Bengal have decided to revamp their IT cells and enhance social media presence to take on each other in the virtual space. Both the parties have been engaged in a bitter political battle for the past few years and are now planning to extend it to the social media turf. TMC is set to organise a Digital Conclave on September 10 at Nazrul Mancha, where Abhishek Banerjee will address its IT members, ministers and youth workers.
A senior Trinamool leader said, “During this conclave, special instructions will be given to ministers to be more active on social media such as Twitter and Facebook to directly interact with the masses. Most of the BJP ministers are active on social media but in comparison only a few of our ministers and party leaders are active on social media. This has to increase.” The party will train over 40,000 youths on the usage of social media to reach out to the masses across the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies of the state. TMC has apparently set a target of creating 10,000 WhatsApp groups with 256 members in each of them to spread awareness on the developmental work of the state government and “anti-people” policies of the BJP government at the Centre.
A member of the TMC's Social Media IT cell said, “Till now, we have been able to create 3000 WhatsApp groups and for each Lok Sabha constituency, we have created a separate media page. We have 12-14 people monitoring media content, fake news and trolls from district level to booth level.” Colonel (Retd) Dipatanshu Chowdhury, joint convenor of TMC's Media cell said the party is not looking into the usage of Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp but also other platforms such as Messenger, microblogging sites, e-mails, Pinterest, and Instagram.
He said, “Social media is going to play a very vital role in the next Lok Sabha polls. We are looking at the use of digital spectrum so that we can reach out to our target audience, especially youths and first time voters.”
