Karnati Varun ReddyAIR 7 · CSE 2018 · 186 wordsTheir whole copy
Opening
Social media websites twitter, facebook and apps like whatsapp has profoundly changed political participation and civic Engagement.
Political Participation
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(i) Debates on policies, manifestos, ideologies of political parties are happening over social media (ii) Government policy discussions deliberations → e.g. TRAI net neutrality debate on facebook twitter • change.org petitions to reverse section 377, pass transgender bill (iii) Huge outrage against uri attacks by Pakistan based terrorists on social media → put pressure on Government to respond
Civic Engagement (i) Not just citizen-to-government but social media helped government reach to citizens
e.g. Ministry of External Affairs rescuing Yemen conflict trapped Indians based on twitter messages
• Bengaluru police actively engage, respond to citizen queries on twitter
(ii) Therefore it is promoting good governance, reaching out information to citizens
Close · a way forward
On the contrary, we have incidents of abuse of social media . For e.g. Dadri lynching incident based on whatsApp message ; radicalisation by ISIS via social media etc.
Therefore we have to effectively leverage social media potential for political participation and civic engagement through establishing certain code of conduct on social media for netizens and effective regulation.