• Twitter Influencing During the Second Wave Covid Crisis in India

    Arshia Arya, Gazal Shekhawat, Joyojeet Pal (Cite Arya, Arshia, Shekhawat, Gazal, Pal, Joyojeet. 2021. Twitter Influencing During the Second Wave Covid Crisis in India Online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/twittercovid2) We analysed the changes in following of Twitter accounts originating in India, to examine the patterns that help understand the role of influencers during this period. Here is a…

  • Twitter and the 2021 West Bengal Assembly Elections

    Rynaa Grover and Joyojeet Pal (Cite Grover, Rynaa, Pal, Joyojeet. 2021. What Drives Twitter Following of Indian Politicians? Online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/westbengal) Social Media Activity We plotted the social media activity for the key parties of West Bengal in the run up to the 2021 assembly elections. For this, we measured the activity of politicians who hold…

  • What Drives Twitter Following of Indian Politicians?

    Arshia Arya and Joyojeet Pal   (Cite A Arya, J Pal. 2021. What Drives Twitter Following of Indian Politicians? Online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/TwitterFollowingPoliticians) We traced the social media following of politicians in India between December 2020 and March 2021, the key phase of the farmer protests in India as well as the run up to several assembly…

  • Koo and the attempt to create a ‘nationalist Twitter’

    Arshia Arya, Dibyendu Mishra, Joyojeet Pal     We conducted a preliminary study of influence networks on Koo, and their relationship to activity on Twitter. Here are a few findings. First, we find that the design of the Koo app makes for more propagation of individual accounts. The landing page encourages users to follow other…

  • Rihanna versus Bollywood: Twitter Influencers and the Indian Farmers’ protest

    Dibyendu Mishra, Syeda Zainab Akbar, Arshia Arya, Saloni Dash, Rynaa Grover, Joyojeet Pal D Mishra, SZ Akbar, A Arya, S Dash, R Grover, J Pal. 2021. Rihanna versus Bollywood: Twitter Influencers and the Indian Farmers’ Protest. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.04031, 2021. Available online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/RihannaVsBollywood   On February 2, 2021, American musician Rihanna posted a tweet, asking “why…

  • Indian Twitter and its anti-nationals

    Cite: Sharma, A. and Pal, J. (2020) Indian Twitter and its anti-nationals. Available online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/antinationals Recent references to the farmer protests as “anti-national”, including by major political actors, raises questions of how the term has been used. Much recent work has considered ways in which the notion of being antinational has been attached to various forms of dissent [1] [2] [3], but also…

  • Twitter in Bihar Politics

    Cite: Negi, H. and Pal, J. (2020) Twitter in Bihar Politics. Available online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/twitterbihar We summarize the key trends with Twitter use among politicians in Bihar. Language We see that for all the parties, tweeting in Hindi gets significantly more retweets than when they tweet in English. The size of the colored bubbles in the scatter…

  • Anatomy of a Rumour: Social media and the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput

    work by Syeda Zainab Akbar, Ankur Sharma, Himani Negi, Anmol Panda, and Joyojeet Pal   We studied the social media content on Sushant Singh Rajput between June 14 and September 12, 2020. On this page, we summarize the key results, and offer links to some of the data. First, we have a Miro board which…

  • Indian Journalists’ reach on Twitter during the COVID-19 crisis

    Dibyendu Mishra, Joyojeet Pal (Suggested Citation: Mishra, D., Pal, J. (2020) Indian Journalists’ reach on Twitter during the COVID-19 crisis. Available online at: https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/indian-journalists-reach-on-twitter-during-the-covid-19-crisis/) We mapped the reach of Indian journalists in the months leading up to, and following the COVID-19 crisis in India. The goal of this work was to understand the outreach of journalists…