Nowadays social media is used to influence public opinion either positively or negatively. Being a civil servant, how will you solve this issue?

The issue

• Platforms reward speed and emotion, so rumour outruns a gazette.
• Paid influence, deepfakes, and coordinated piles can manufacture a “public” that is only a dashboard.
• Positive use exists: disaster alerts, scholarship outreach, fact-checked explainers.
• Negative use includes hate, fake recruitment ads, and pressure on a pending inquiry.

What the officer must not do

• Do not run a covert political campaign from an official handle.
• Do not mass-report dissent as fake merely because it criticises a scheme.
• Do not name accused children or a whole community as guilty on a viral post.
• Do not outsource the district’s voice to an unpaid “IT cell” with no file.

Constructive response

• Official truth, fast and plain: a short, sourced note on the website and handle when a fake circular or riot clip appears, without extra-judicial naming.
• Separate the officer’s private account from the office; Conduct Rules still follow the public servant online.
• Use authorised fact-check routes (PIB Fact Check, State information machinery) rather than personal duels.
• Due process under IT law: takedown only through lawful orders, not through a phone call to a friend at a platform.
• Digital literacy in schools and panchayats: how to read a forwarded PDF of a “collector’s order.”
• Listening: social media is also a grievance sensor; a spike of ration complaints is data, not only noise.
• Internal discipline: punish staff who leak a charge-sheet to score a trend.
• During polls, extra restraint: the Model Code is an ethics of silence as well as of speech.

Institutional, not heroic, fix

• One officer cannot “solve” the attention market. The officer can keep the State’s voice clean, fast, and legally owned, and can refuse to manufacture consent.