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Co-WIN: Really Winning? Analysing Inequity in India’s Vaccination Response
Overall, India has achieved remarkable results in its vaccination drive, given the inherent weakness of our healthcare system. However, with only roughly 50% of the Indian population fully vaccinated as of 20th January 2022, India still has a long way to go. Throughout the course of the vaccination drive so far, multiple new policies have been introduced to ensure that vaccines are readily available and vaccination coverage is increased. However, at the same time, some of the government policies introduced have led to unintended inequities in the populations being targeted. We enumerate and analyze the inequities that existed in India’s vaccination policy drive, and also compute the effect of the…
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The long winding road of a research project …
Every research project has its journey, and this is the story of one of them. My (5th year Dual Degree CSE student) tryst with this research project titled ‘Suspended Accounts’ started way back in July 2019. It’s been over two years since the project’s inception. It took over two years to complete this project, a sign that it wasn’t the smoothest of rides. I am using this blog as a medium to pen down some takeaways that I took from my first experience leading a research project. Again I will emphasize that these are my takeaways and are not universally applicable. Prune the Project: We went into the project with…
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Challenging big social media, falling to partisanship: The Koo Conundrum
We examined the use of social media by politicians on Koo to understand the spread of political preference and engagement for the social media channel that has sought to challenge Twitter online. We find that the broad trend is not partisan, but almost entirely dominated by a single political party, the BJP. Moreover, we find that there is a clear pattern of repeat use, where politicians are not switching away from other platforms, but rather using Koo in addition to, and more importantly, as a secondary option to their existing accounts on Twitter. Both of these have consequences for the longer-term adoption of Koo, and the content experience of new…
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Is a Democrat more likely to wear a mask than a Republican?? Unmasking the partisan combat, an analysis through Instagram
We analyze 3.91 million Instagram posts collected throughout 2020 from the 4 top Democratic and 4 top Republican states. Posts from Democratic states were found to have significantly higher percentages of detected masks, and significantly lower percentages of group photos, showing higher adoption of mask-wearing and social distancing measures than Republican states. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed life in the world including, United States, with the country recording over 32.3 million cases and 574,000 deaths as of April, 2020. With the ongoing widespread vaccine rollout, the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions like mask-wearing mandates and stay-at-home laws have proved to be critical for stopping possible transmission routes. In the lead-up to…
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Koo: The New King? Characterizing India’s Emerging Social Network
India’s recent multilingual social network, Koo, has generated quite a buzz in the past few months. The platform, which closely resembles the microblogging service Twitter, was launched in March 2020 to encourage online discourse in Indian languages. Koo saw an enormous surge in popularity due to the Indian Government’s standoff with Twitter over the latter’s refusal to block accounts the Centre claimed were spreading fake news related to the February 2021 farmers’ protests. Many politicians, celebrities, and government departments tweeted about their shift to Koo and encouraged others to join. As Koo became the talk of the town, we decided to collect data and characterize the platform based on its…
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Capitol Riots/Aftermath : The Road from Washington to Arrest
In the aftermath of the Capitol riots that took place on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C., federal prosecutors continue to charge participants involved. USA TODAY is gathering details of these cases as the FBI keeps identifying and prosecuting more perpetrators involved in the storming. They have compiled a list [Link] of people arrested on a range of charges filed by federal prosecutors, as well as those arrested by Capitol Police and D.C. Metro Police for storming the capitol building. Information for each arrest includes the date of arrest/charge, home state, the charges and a brief summary of what happened. We have collected data from the first arrest taking place…
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#LokSabhaElections2019 #NCT #Delhi Political Handles, Popularity
The constituencies in the NCT of Delhi are scheduled to go for elections on May 12th as part of phase six, in this analysis we take a closer look at the constituencies, candidates, their social media handles, etc. There are seven constituencies in Delhi, and 164 candidates will be contesting across these constituencies. 148 (90.25%) of the total candidates are males while 16 (9.75%) of the total candidates are females. We went through all the Affidavits* submitted by the candidates to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to collect each candidate’s demographics and social media details. The table below covers the distribution of social media handles that we were able…
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Live Blog: #Phase5 #LokSabhaElections2019 #SocialMedia
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NaMo Vs RaGa: On Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
As the nation gears up for the first phase of the parliamentary elections tomorrow, it will be interesting to see in detail the emerging candidates vying for the seat of the Prime Minister seat. Taking forward our empirical analysis of Social Media dialogues around elections, we analyze the two primary candidates, Narendra Modi (NaMo) and Rahul Gandhi (RaGa). In this blog, we have a look at their presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Before we get into the analysis of their profiles, we quickly visit the recently released manifestos of each of their parties and share a word cloud of the topics addressed in them. To obtain this…
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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…