{"id":586098,"date":"2019-03-01T09:30:04","date_gmt":"2019-03-01T13:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=cf9b70e72e7bc38536bdfe7686d3fe24"},"modified":"2019-03-01T09:30:04","modified_gmt":"2019-03-01T13:30:04","slug":"indias-whatsapp-election-political-parties-risk-undermining-democracy-with-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=586098","title":{"rendered":"India&#8217;s WhatsApp election: Political parties risk undermining democracy with technology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>India&#8217;s 2019 national elections are widely anticipated to be the &#8220;WhatsApp elections&#8221;. Against a backdrop of rapidly improving internet connectivity and rising smartphone use, the number of people using private messaging service WhatsApp has soared since its India launch in mid-2010 to more than 200m \u2013 more users than in any other democracy. And now the country&#8217;s political parties are moving to capitalise on this mass communication channel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>India&#8217;s 2019 national elections are widely anticipated to be the &#8220;WhatsApp elections&#8221;. Against a backdrop of rapidly improving internet connectivity and rising smartphone use, the number of people using private messaging service WhatsApp has soared since its India launch in mid-2010 to more than 200m &ndash; more users than in any other democracy. And now the country&#8217;s political parties are moving to capitalise on this mass communication channel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-586098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=586098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586099,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586098\/revisions\/586099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=586098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=586098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=586098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}