Leading up to India's 2014 elections, expected to be held in April, Facebook has announced the launch of Facebook Talks Live, with politicians like Narendra Modi (BJP) on March 3rd, Arvind Kejriwal (AAP) on March 4th, Akhilesh Yadav (SP) on March 6th, Lalu Prasad Yadav (RJD) on March 8th, as well as with Mamata Banerjee (TMC) on a date as yet unspecified. The talks being launched in partnership with news website Newslaundry and TV channel NDTV, and they will be broadcast on NDTV as well as live streamed on the web, here. Facebook appears to be emulating Google, which has made some headway with its Hangouts platform in India. Interestingly, even the hangouts with politicians were begun with the BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, and that move has so far let to more and more politicians using the platform for interacting with citizens. Twitter doesn't have a media property, but politicians like Arun Jaitly and Milind Deora have recently used Twitter chats for interacting with potential voters. A few points on Facebook, Social Media and the Elections: 1. Facebook is lagging: Firstly, Facebook hasn't been as aggressive as Google and Twitter in terms of getting politicians to interact on the site. While Google's team has been working on Hangouts with politicians for a couple of years now, Twitter's Rishi Jaitly has been meeting political parties to help them understand how to use the platform. That mandate is now with Raheel Khursheed, who was recently hired by the company as its…
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