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Female Political Handles: Followed by more, Post more, Re-tweet more, and Follow less
We manually annotated the 1,252 verified handles, for various characteristics of the handles, like party affiliation, state / city, and gender. Among the 1,252 handles, we found 865 (69.1%) to be men, 133 (10.6%) to be women, and the rest 254 (20.3%) handles to be associated with parties. This blog is dedicated to analysing men and women handles. Analysis was done with the data as of March 1, 2019. We found female political handles to have more followers than males. On average, females had 368.5K (min: 422, max: 12.2M) followers, while male handles has 347.8K (min: 47, max: 46.2M) followers. With @narendramodi having the maximum followers (46.2M) in male and…
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Verified Political Handles: Party Distribution, Political Status, Gender Diversity, and Network Interactions
Our data collection covers 2,585 Twitter handles which we find have some affiliation to an Indian political party. This list was manually curated and we have been collecting data for these handles from late 2018 through the Twitter API. Among these 2,585 handles, we found 1,252 political handles to be Verified Twitter Handles. It is interesting to see this large number of verified accounts in this elections. When we analysed the Twitter data for 2014 Elections, we found only 71 Verified Indian political handles. We manually annotated these handles for their state representation, party affiliation, Lok Sabha / Rajya Sabha affiliation, and gender (in case of a handle representing an…
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WhatsFarzi: Analyzing Fake / Manipulated content / Misinformation on WhatsApp
As mobile coverage penetrates the most remote areas and data packages become cheaper every day, over 4 billion people across the world today have access to the Internet, of which more than 56% traffic comes from mobile devices. This is especially true in developing countries like India, where more than 430 million Indians out of the total online population of 462 million access the Internet through mobile phones. WhatsApp is the most popular personal messaging service in India, with more than 200 million users, the highest in the world. One of the biggest side effects of WhatsApp’s deep penetration is its misuse as a medium to disseminate misinformation. Last year,…
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Twitter’s “suspect users” affects Indian political handles
Twitter removed “suspected users” from their platform during the week of Nov 1, 2018. This is potentially about 2.4 Million handles. Given our interest in analyzing political accounts in India, we were keen on analyzing how much of this affected the Indian political scenario. We found a large number of handles losing followers. Lets look at some of the handles which lost large numbers of followers because of this removal of suspected users. The handle @KirenRijiju had 599K followers on Nov 7, 2018 and it had 475K followers on Nov 8, 2018. The handle lost about 124K followers in one day. Below is a graph showing this in more…
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This is Why I Love My #ProfGiri #3
Once again it is that time of the academic year when all graduating students and Research Associates are moving / moved on to the next phase in their life; starting work or grad school in India or flying off to some grad school outside India. It is super gratifying to see students achieve their goals, and more satisfying to play a role in the process. Below is the list of students (arranged in alphabetical order of last name) who have spent significant amount of time working with me this year / last 2 years or more / who are graduating with me or I have written a Letters of Recommendation…
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Projects, Methodology, Results, and Blogs. Privacy and Security in Online Social Media @ IIITH
Continuing the tradition of capturing project ideas, methodologies, results, and artefacts from the course in a blog, here are the projects from the Fall 2018 edition of PSOSM @ IIITH. For Fall 2017 edition @ IIITD, please visit here. I taught TM18004: Privacy and Security in Online Social Media in Fall 2018 semester. This is my 1st full time teaching experience at IIIT Hyderabad. It was super exciting to teach as a faculty in the same institute where I had taken courses (in 2003 / 2004). It now makes most sense to me why faculty who teach at their alum institutes take so much pride, I have so many friends…
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Has the battle for General Elections 2019 shifted online?
Social Media, today, is playing a very important role in the politics of almost every nation. In India, there has been a boom in social media political campaigns, which was more marked in the 2014 General Elections. All major political parties used social media to promote their manifestos and interact in the public domain in a one-to-one manner. They analysed different views of the people, and worked on them. The Home Minister, in a seminar after the 2014 general elections, also said that “Through social media, the government is outlining its plan, its vision”. After assuming power, the NDA government has been using Twitter, Facebook and blogs to outline its…
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Ideas, Projects, Methodology, Results, Blogs, and Videos. Privacy and Security in Online Social Media.
I taught CSE648: Privacy and Security in Online Social Media in Fall 2017 semester. We had 108 students taking the course for credits, and 5 Teaching Assistants. We also had 2 Research Associates helping with the course. There were in total 22 projects developed as part of the course. It was wonderful to see the projects spanning all popular networks, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tinder, Foursquare, YouTube and many networks that are designed for specific purposes like Twitch, SoundCloud, GoodReads. The intention for this blog is to capture all the projects related details and share it widely for larger audience. Thanks to all the wonderful work by students in the class.…
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Another amazing edition of CSE 501: Designing Human Centered Systems
Teaching DHCS has always been fun and exciting! As always, I had a lot of stories to tell students on the first day of class, about the past editions of the course, with descriptions of the projects, video recordings of past students, and Facebook pictures of BBIs! In total, we had 108 students take the course, with 20 projects, and 6 Teaching Assistants. We had wonderful guest lectures by Karan Gupta from Dropbox (IIITD Alum, MS in Design from Univ. of Washington), Apoorv Narang from Instawork (IIITD Alum, MS in HCI from Carnegie Mellon University), Prof. Timothy Moyers (faculty at IIITD), and Harshita Arora, an unschooler! All these guest lectures…
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#DeanGiri V1.0
It is natural in the course of a faculty’s life to take up administrative roles in the institute. Rolling positions of Deans, HoDs is something faculty would do at least once in their career. While it is very prestigious to be a Dean or HoD, it also means less time for research, attending more meetings etc. So, obviously it was a mixed emotion when I started as the Associate Dean of Communications and Alumni starting July 1, 2017. I was excited that I will be interacting with students/alums all around the world. This is something I have been doing for past some years on my trips to various cities in…