In the last decade, there has been an increasing engagement of celebrities’ social media accounts by politicians in India, either to piggy-back on their existing fan base through casual messaging, or to explicitly use them as part of an electoral or propaganda campaign.
Here are a few papers we have published on this:
Dibyendu Mishra, Syeda Zainab Akbar, Arshia Arya, Saloni Dash, Rynaa Grover, Joyojeet Pal (2021) Rihanna versus Bollywood: Twitter Influencers and the Indian Farmers’ Protest. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2102.04031
This paper shows how there was coordinated, almost hourly, tweeting by Indian celebrities in support of the Delhi government on the day following pop star Rihanna’s tweet in support of the Indian farmers’ protest.
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Joyojeet Pal, Priyank Chandra, and Vinod Vydiswaran (2016) “Twitter and the Rebranding of Narendra Modi” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 51, Issue No. 8, 20 Feb, 2016
This paper traces how early celebrity engagements including with Rajinikanth, Ajay Devgun, Amitabh Bachchan and cricket stars were a key part of rebranding Narendra Modi in the run up to the 2014 elections
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Shora, Shehla Rashid, Arya, Arshia, & Pal, Joyojeet (2023) Institutional isomorphism in corporate Twitter discourse on citizenship and immigration in India and the United States. Global Policy. Volume 14, Issue 5.Pages 938-948 https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13241
This paper shows that leaders in business in India who are on Twitter are much more likely to toe the government’s position on issues and avoid controversy unlike business leaders in the US, who will at times openly speak against policy on humanitarian or economic grounds.
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Dibyendu Mishra, Ronojoy Sen, Joyojeet Pal (2023) Sporting the government: Sportspersons’ engagement with causes in India and the USA on twitter. Global Policy. Volume 14, Issue 5. November 2023. Pages 925-937. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13164
This paper shows that sportspersons in India are far more likely than sportspersons in the US to retweet messaging from the government to publicly show their support, and argues that private ownership of sports and the protection from government is what allows US sportspersons to be opely critical of the government.
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Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Dibyendu Mishra, Sachita Nishal, Faisal M. Lalani, and Joyojeet Pal. 2022. Voting with the Stars: Analyzing Partisan Engagement between Celebrities and Politicians in India. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW1, Article 134 (April 2022), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512981
This paper uses large scale data analysis to examine the ways in which politicians use celebrities for online campaigning in India, and specifically the advantage that the BJP has by virtue of its command on the nationalistic discourse.
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Joyojeet Pal. 2017. The Technological Self in India: From Tech-savvy Farmers to a Selfie-tweeting Prime Minister. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 11, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3136560.3136583
This paper traces the history of how the imagination of technology – the software sector, engineers, and tech-savvy individuals as positive values was central to Modi’s use of selfies and celebrity engagements early in his social media engagement
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Pal, Joyojeet. (2019) “Legitimacy, Support and Endorsement: Narendra Modi’s Social Media Engagement.” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol 54. Issue 7.
This paper shows how the early use of one-sided callouts by @narendramodi helped perform a celebrity-driven endorsement of the 2014 campaign.
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Rynaa Grover, Gazal Shekhawat, and Joyojeet Pal. 2021. Twitter superstars don’t win elections: A Poster on Twitter Campaigning and Electoral Realities in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly Elections. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 428–431. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471982
This paper shows that the approach taken in the 2021 West Bengal election, of fielding celebrities in state legislature seats, largely failed, even though they had massively higher engagement on their social media messaging related to the election campaign.
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Dash, S., Mishra, D., Shekhawat, G., & Pal, J. (2022). Divided We Rule: Influencer Polarization on Twitter during Political Crises in India. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 16(1), 135-146.
This paper also uses large scale data to show that influencers in India are highly polarized, aligning with a broader point that once an influencer is sufficiently polarized they are beholden to the side they polarize wtih
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Agrima Seth, Soham De, Arshia Arya, Steven Wilkinson, Sushant Singh, and Joyojeet Pal. 2023. Closed Ranks: The Discursive Value of Military Support for Indian Politicians on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3572334.3572395
This paper shows that military veterans, particularly those with significant social media influence, largely engage the values and initiatives of the government, which offers normative legitimacy to its positions.
