New Delhi: India will make efforts to protect its citizens from influence campaigns on social media that could undermine the election process, Union information technology (IT) minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told a gathering of ministers from G-20 nations, the government said on Sunday.
“India had taken a serious note of reported misuse of social media platform data,” a statement from the IT ministry quoted Prasad as saying at the G-20 Digital Economy Ministerial meeting in Salata, Argentina. “Such platforms will never be allowed to abuse our election process for extraneous means.”
The comments come amid worry that data of users on web services such as Facebook and Twitter can be mined and misused in order to influence poll outcomes, a concern stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The minister also met messaging service WhatsApp’s global head last week to convey the concerns over the spread of fake news in the country.