Uttarakhand Congress BJP issued show-cause by EC over Facebook advertising
Both Parties making extensive use of social media to woo the youth
Chief electoral officer (CEO) of Uttarakhand Radha Raturi on Friday issued show-cause notices to the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for misusing social media for electioneering after a string of senior leaders were found displaying poll-related advertisements on Facebook without prior consent. The CEO has sought an explanation within three days from the state chief of the Congress Kishore Upadhyay and BJP chief Ajay Bhatt on why “the blatant misuse of social media should not be considered a gross violation of model code of conduct”.
The notices were issued after a team headed by additional CEO S A Murugesan found that different political outfits had poll-related ads on Facebook which had not been certified by the media certification monitoring committee.
According to the Murugesan-led team, senior BJP leaders, including Ajay Bhatt, Satpal Maharaj, Dinesh Singh Panwar, Ajay Bhandari, Umesh Agarwal, Bhupesh Upadhyay, Pradeep Batra and Ganesh Joshi, were posting poll-related content on Facebook without permission.
Similarly, senior Congress leaders, including chief minister Harish Rawat, minister Indira Hridayesh, Kishore Upadhyay, Congress’s state women’s chief Sarita Arya, Tilakraj Behad, were also found running poll campaigns on social media without taking prior permission.
