Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday said it was necessary to keep social media “toxic free” so that an “intelligent and smart narrative” about India’s progress can be built, PTI reported.
“We should be the pioneers to make that place toxic-free,” she in her address at the sixth Social Media Conclave in Bengaluru. “It should be an engagement forum, but without bitterness, toxicity, negativity.”
Sitharaman also disagreed with the use of the term warriors for those propagating government programmes on social media, saying she preferred to call them architects.
“Architects do wonderful things to make our environment, ecosystem better,” she said. “They bring in more trees. I think, as architects of the social media, we should bring in more culture in the wonderful, technology-based, interaction fora – whether it is Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook, and a lot more. We communicate better by bringing in a lot of facts. We get the reality in pictures, in words.”
The minister said everyone wants a better India and has thoughts about how civic and individuals lives can be improved. Sitharaman said she knew that India needs to “move fast”. “The narrative per se should become intelligent and smart,” she added. “We do not want social media to have a toxicity flow.”
Her comments came days after Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah reportedly told the party’s social media volunteers in Rajasthan’s Kota city that the party can make any message, whether real or fake, go viral.
“It is through social media that we have to form governments at the state and national levels,” Dainik Bhaskar quoted him as saying, according to The Wire. “Keep making messages go viral. We have already made a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in Uttar Pradesh; every morning they are sent a message at 8 am.”
Shah reportedly said that during the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections a volunteer had spread the rumour that Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav had slapped his father Mulayam Singh Yadav. “No such thing had happened,” Shah allegedly said. “Mulayam and Akhilesh were 600 km apart. But he put this message. And the social media team spread it.”
He reportedly told the audience that this was something worth doing but asked them not to. “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake,” he allegedly added. “We can do this work only because we have 32 lakh people in our WhatsApp groups.”
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