New Delhi During this election season, the Election Commission of India (ECI) sent a handful of notices to parties such as the Aam Aadmi Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party for posts on social media that violated the model code of conduct.

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HT has learnt that the reason those notices weren’t acted upon is that ECI concluded there was a lacuna in the current policy about holding political parties accountable for social media activity, and is now considering making changes to ensure political parties and leaders can be held accountable for social media content. These could include enabling takedown notices to political parties for mocking or ridiculing leaders from other parties, and even reviewing how parties can use missed calls to propagate their campaign messages. HT has also learnt that ECI is looking to fix lacunae in the People’s Representation Act to tackle ads that seem to be blatant falsehoods.

All this, a top official aware of the matter said, would be done in keeping with ECI’s larger belief in “ensuring moral censure in MCC cases without curbing free debate of ideas”.

In the last bout of assembly elections, the poll body issued show cause notices to Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva and Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal over posts from their individual handles, and to the two parties for posts from their official Facebook and Twitter (now X) accounts. In most of those posts, the party in question had mocked the other’s star campaigners — mainly Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the BJP and Kejriwal for the AAP.

In all those cases, ECI felt that there was a fine line between satire and defamation, but did not act due to policy constraints. “We are planning to correct that deficiency,” the official cited above said.

In one of the cases, the poll body issued a show cause notice to the Congress’s Rajasthan state president Govind Singh Dotasra over an advertisement “asking voters” to call on a particular number to register for certain “guarantees”.

“This was done because the Congress advertised in newspapers and on social media that calling on a particular number would generate a registration number, creating an impression that only the caller would benefit by voting for a particular candidate or party, specifically the Indian National Congress,” the official said.

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The poll body found the advertisement to be prima facie in violation of the MCC.“It appears that the advertisement is aimed at enticing the individual voters to vote in a particular way in lieu of a future benefit,” ECI noted.

When contacted, former chief election commissioner SY Quraishi said that while the law may be restricting in ECI’s actions, the panel could use its influence. “There is no law which bars political parties from painting all over their messaging. But we use existing laws and our strength to ensure that this isn’t done. So, the same could be done with social media too,’’ he said.