Social media campaigning money accountable

Ankur Garg, chief nodal officer said, “Social media is an important segment and in case candidates want to post their advertisement on websites they need to take approval for the content from the Media Certification and Monitoring Committee (MCMC). Once approval is given the committee sends it to the expenditure monitoring cell which will include it in the candidate’s total expenditure”.

The other senior official said, “we are also planning to seek information from the candidates as to how much they spent on getting the content created. A number of companies are hired for this purpose and lakhs of rupees are spent on creating the advertisement itself. Once that is done, candidates then spend money on paying the websites where they place the advertisements. Usually payment is made depending on the hits the website gets”.