Chennai
The political party cadres and party office bearers in Tamil Nadu known for their street-smart campaigns, booth management and poll strategies may soon have to learn Artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning, according to sources in the political strategy business. Gone are the days where the party would rely on cadres and their multiple sources for political intelligence.
“To gain political intelligence and to know the voters' mentality, the press conference of party leaders, political debates, statements, memes and tweets are now subjected to artificial intelligence to read the moods of public and their sentiments,” explains former AIADMK IT wing secretary Aspire Swaminathan, who has developed Aspire 2.0 software for political intelligence.
The big data concept embedded in this software is such that it can identify how a particular booth in any constituency of Tamil Nadu had been voting for the past 40 years. There are certain booths in which majority voters belong to a particular community, through AI we can zero in on the community mood towards a political party before and after polls, he said. Poll data of 65,000 polling booths have been added to the software so that the grounded political intelligence is readily available for the district secretaries and poll managers to execute the election strategies, Swaminathan said.
“We have a concept called as “sentimetre” in which the mood change and public opinion can be traced by monitoring the political press conferences, leaders interview and TV news channel debates. We will run these public comments in the software and the software will tell us whether the public mood is negative, positive or neutral in political issues. For example, if there is a rape, or demonetisation exercise or fuel price hike, the public comments on these issues attached to news channels, print media websites, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and memes will be evaluated through AI with just a click of the button, Swaminathan added.
“All over the world political strategy companies are developing software to monitor the political activities at the micro-level. The poll strategy companies go in for the big data concept by roping in the data of election commission, census department and government schemes and the number of beneficiaries. A quick artificial intelligence search will help the policymakers to learn about whether a particular scheme is popular or not popular among the public,” said a former employee of the Indian Action Political Committee (I-PAC). These data are crucial for the political parties ahead of polls, where they can do the course correction. Earlier internal surveys and journalists were used by the political parties to get an idea of the public mood, but now AI has started replacing such field works, the campaign strategist said.
The role of the IT wing will be crucial for the political parties, thanks to mobile and internet penetration. Earlier politics was about organising public meetings and rallies to reach the mass. And now this concept is replaced by technology-induced politics, said Karthick Kamalakkannan who handled the digital campaign for a couple of MLAs in the recently held assembly polls. There is a direct digital campaign and indirect digital campaign like memes. At times indirect campaign yields more political gains like those which made rounds during the Jallikattu protests in TN, Karthick recalled.
Visit news.dtnext.in to explore our interactive epaper!
Download the DT Next app for more exciting features!
Click here for iOS
Click here for Android