Social media historians or digital detectives?

The scene of crime syndrome – you would think of it as a term typically favoured by Sherlock Homes. But in recent times it is surfacing more and more from unexpected quarters – the social media jingbang.

It is most intriguing to see how the social media brigades, especially the ones pursuing agendas, are pulling the tweets and posts from their bunny bag and circulating them in a manner that is most ill-timed for opponents. And all this, long after the original author has removed them from their timelines to avoid embarrassment over a change of heart or opinion. The truth about social media is simple: Once you press the send button, it goes on to live forever even if you decide to press delete the very next moment.

Actually, there is a whole army of people whose job is just to capture what could best be referred to as “scene of crime” posts and save the images for future use. Welcome to the digital extension of the dirty tricks department in political parties. But more respectfully, we must call them Social Media Historians.

The footprints that you leave digitally on your timelines can come back to haunt you when you want to wish them away the most. The Delhi elections proved this beyond doubt. Kiran Bedi who emerged as the chief ministerial candidate the for BJP also had a taste of this unpleasant digital onslaught because of her change of heart about the saffron party. Sample these posts which seem to be mirror images of each other.

The next casualty was Shazia Ilmi when she decided to parashoot into the BJP after swearing by the AAP.

Post the realignment of the political equations in Kashmir with the PDP-BJP combine, even former J&K CM Omar Abdullah could not resist the temptation of turning into a Twitter political commentator.

The Delhi election also made BJP’s chanakya Amit Shah gulp back a few digital proclamations about Arvind Kejriwal. With Twitter you can’t bite your tongue if you have put your foot in the mouth.

These digital detectives won’t spare anyone – not even the prime minister who cannot run away from the flak as he himself has given credibility to social media, being one of its most active global protagonists.

Sample this. Back in 2012, Narendra Modi, the then CM of Gujarat, changed his Twitter display picture to black to protest internet censorship. Now his government has done a volte-face by recommending to the Supreme Court that the reach and impact of internet being wider, the level of restriction on this medium should be higher in comparison to print and television.

To round off, public memory is short but the social media memory will keep reminding people of what has already been said and repetitions will be judged for honesty like in this case where Arvind Kejriwal has two similar experiences, incidentally, both around the Delhi elections. Let us give it here to benevolent beggars of Delhi.

In a nutshell, if we were to cut this long story short, social media is proving to be the new digital arsenal in the toolkit of most parties and individuals who have an axe to grind.