Ranchi: Promoting any particular candidate on a WhatsApp group might land you in soup this election season. With Lok Sabha elections just weeks away, administrators of WhatsApp group are under the scanner of the administration across the state.Latehar and Ranchi district administrations have already issued notifications warning group admins of action against promotion of any political leader or candidate in groups . However, WhatsApp does not have a mechanism that lets an individual give his or consent to be an admin and that has left many citizens concerned.Talking to TOI, Ranchi subdivisional officer Garima Singh said: “The monitoring is divided into two parts. We have a team who are added to several WhatsApp groups and they will be monitoring the activities in the same. But we will be largely rely on complaints from citizens to curb circulation of such messages in the groups on the messaging platform.”The notification from both the districts have mentioned that promotion of any particular candidate on a WhatsApp group will draw action against the admins under relevant sections of the Representation of the People Act (1951). All such promotions have been put under the category of ‘paid news’ and will be considered a violation of the model code.Explaining how an admin added to a WhatsApp group circulating promotional messages are responsible, Vineet Kumar, president of awareness group Cyber Peace Foundation said: “When a person is added to a group as an admin by an unknown number, they have the option to mark it as a spam or click for confirmation. Once they see a message or open a group they have been added to, they automatically become an ally condoning the practice. Users need to be alert and remove themselves from suspicious groups the moment they are added to the same. They can do so when they are given admin rights without consent too.”The announcement has left many youngsters, who are most active on such messaging platforms, concerned. “I think there should be a notification system especially when a person is added to a group as an admin. This will help the users who are not very adept with technology. As far as I am concerned, I will be alert an monitor my WhatsApp account and remove myself from groups created by unknown contacts,” said Bhagwat Kumar, a second-year student at Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee University.

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