IT cell (plural IT cells)
- (India, politics) a department of a political party set up to promote the party and influence political discussion on social media
2017 April 26, “YSRCP IT wing incharge appears before cops”, in The Hans India[1]:YSRCP IT Cell in-charge Challa Madhusudan Reddy categorically said that his party was no way associated with Political Punch website founder Inturi Ravikiran, who was earlier questioned by police for posting graphic content berating AP Legislative Council in social media.
2019 January 29, “Former BJP data analyst on how the party wins elections and influences people”, in The Caravan[2]:The BJP’s IT cell used these influencers first, but then began ignoring them because they thought the Modi magic was enough. The party is in trouble because just the IT cell, fake accounts and bots do not achieve what needs to be accomplished through social media.
2020 January 28, Neerad Pandharipande, “Massive tweet volumes, complex hierarchies, coordinated attacks: Hacker reveals how BJP, Congress IT cells wage war on social media”, in Firstpost[3]:According to him, while the IT cells of both the BJP and Congress engage in coordinated activity on Twitter, the former has a much larger and more complex structure than the latter. However, what is common to both is a set of nodal or seed accounts that act as the source of political content.
2021 November 29, Regina Mihindukulasuriya, “From ‘I had idli’ to political megaphone, how tiny Twitter punches above its weight in India”, in ThePrint[4]:Journalists who are on Twitter often decide what is newsworthy based on the top few trending hashtags or keywords. Therefore, it became the goal of political IT cells to tweet enough on a particular topic to make the Twitter algorithms rank it as the number 1 trending topic.
