-
Who-Follows-Whom?, #ChaupalOnTwitter, Political Satire Videos
Who-Follows-Whom? Earlier in our ongoing blog series on the forthcoming Indian parliamentary elections we had characterized the following network of verified political handles. Today we share the results of analysing the follower/following patterns of these handles amongst each other. To understand the interactions between the political handles (otherwise parties), we populate a table which shows the ratio of total number of followings of one party to another by the total number of handles of that party. Below is the table with all the counts of followings of each party’s members against another party’s handles, e.g. total number of connections from all AAP accounts following BJP accounts is 912. Next, we…
-
The #MainBhiChowkidar Campaign: 30% Verified, 36% non-verified Handles added Chowkidar to their Name
Below is the first occurrence of the #MainBhiChowkidar by @narendramodi The tweet was dated March 15th 0900hrs IST. This hashtag was part of the campaign; we found this hashtag trending in India by 1100hrs. We were interested in studying the different facets of this campaign, in particular, name changes in the user name of the accounts, verified and others. Screen name / handle is restricted to 15 alphanumeric characters (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9) with the exception of underscores and name of the account is restricted to 50 alphanumeric characters, including special characters and emojis. First occurrence of MainBhiChowkidar Of the 1,268 verified handles (we reported 1,252 in our blog post…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…