One of the reasons American politics often gets gridlocked is because opinion has become so polarised that even choices of where to live, what movies to watch and who you root for in a trial can be predicted by your voting choices. India isn't there yet. But Indian Twitter is, and you can predictably forecast how things are going to play out on the social network if you've got some sense of the partisan divide.

The thesis is that it doesn't matter what the actual underlying value of the message or proposal is. If it's coming from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it will be lambasted by the Left. Additionally, it doesn't matter if those on the Left are making sense or not, they must be viciously vilified for criticising the prime minister. Over the last 24 hours, both of these narratives have played themselves out so well that they almost seemed scripted.

On Sunday, in his fortnightly Mann Ki Baat radio address, Modi called on fathers across the country to share photos of themselves with their daughters on social media. The idea was to promote Modi's Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (save the girls, educate the girls) scheme and was in fact based on something similar initiated by a sarpanch in a small village in Haryana. Modi promised to retweet those who were using the hashtag, #SelfieWithDaughter. As expected, Modi's critics had something to say about the suggestion.

 


And then the pro-Modi set decided that everyone has to support Modi's initiative to improve the lives of women, and anyone who didn't do that, especially women, deserve abuse.


(Alok Nath later deleted this tweet)




 

So far, so predictable. For all the people who keep complaining about Twitter being one large echo-chamber, it's almost exactly as if that's what people want from it. Consider the rare occasion when someone ostensibly on the "liberal" side of the equation started saying some things that weren't considered acceptable within that set: many on the progressive side decided they would just stop listening.

For the partisans on Twitter, it's almost comforting to see everybody congregate around their expected responses. Sure, it's not as simple as saying, "If Modi does it, it's bad." The more accurate takeaway is: "If Modi picks it up, it's going to bring that much more scrutiny and as a result much more criticism and then result in enough people finding something wrong with it." That means you can get a considered response to it that is critical, like this one.

But you're also much more likely to see people use it as a news peg to connect the scheme to something Modi has done wrong in the past, which is what Krishnan did; attempting to make a reference to Modi's "saheb" affair.

A Pew research study from last year confirmed what lots of other similar bits of research have concluded: Twitter assists with political polarisation. "Polarized Crowds on Twitter are not arguing," the study said. "They are ignoring one another while pointing to different web resources and using different hashtags.”

Fortunately, Twitter is large and contains multitudes. And most importantly, you can customise it.  As Pablo Barbera found in a paper last year, social media can often be useful in exposing people to more diverse views and have a positive effect on political moderation.

While the general experience of following lots of people on Twitter has led to the feeling of it being an echo-chamber, a willing one at that, it's also easy to weed out those on your timelines who add nothing to debates other than simply falling in line. Essentially, Twitter might look like it's broken, but that probably only because you've been a little bit lazy.