By Ben Joseph
(UCA News) — Almost half of the world’s population is set to have new governments this year with several Asian nations set to democratically elect their new leaders.
Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia have concluded their elections in the first two months of the year while India, Korea, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are set to hit the polling stations in the coming months.
These Asian countries go to polls together with some 80 nations across the world, such as the US, the UK, the Netherlands (to elect members of the European Parliament), Finland, Portugal, Russia, and several African and South American nations.
Polls bring hope for change and betterment, although such hopes keep fading. Mutual trust, brotherhood, and faith in democratic constitutions are at their lowest ebb as right-wing religious forces make sustained efforts to capture power, at least in Asia.
Disinformation and misinformation campaigns have become effective tools for politicians, and even state agencies and the media to “engineer” voters and influence the results of elections.
All possibilities of communication technologies are now exploited in elections. It is the time of techno-democracy. The possibilities of the internet, social media, and all forms of electronic communication are controlled to protect the political interest rather than the public interest. States are now in a hurry to curtail the rights and freedoms of voters to communicate in the digital space.
Sri Lanka did it with its sweeping Online Safety Bill on Jan. 24 which proposes jail terms for content that a five-member panel considers illegal ahead of parliamentary and presidential polls.
India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act on Aug. 12 last year after being rushed through the nation’s parliament in six days. The law empowers the government to ask journalists and news........