Narendra Modi’s adoration of the internet was considered a force multiplier even before he became India’s first social media prime minister. His tweets and his Facebook page were widely, and exaggeratedly, believed to have galvanised his followers, taking the Bharatiya Janata Party to a sweeping victory in the 2014 general election.
Almost two years later, a paper by three researchers at the University of Michigan published in the Economic and Political Weekly has broken down not just what Modi’s handle tweets and who it follows, but also how grassroots political work can translate to social media.
“We were initially interested in it when we noticed the growth of Modi on social media,” said Joyojeet Pal, one of the authors of the paper, in an email to Scroll.in. “He had just become the most followed politician on social media in India. We first got interested in the centrality of Modi in the BJP social media network, that is, how many people followed him versus other party leaders, but eventually started to study the content of his messages.”
The authors – Pal, Priyank Chandra and VG Vinod Vydiswaran – based their research on detailed analysis of more than 1,000 tweets by the handle @narendramodi between February 2009 and 2015. The paper is a part of an initiative to study the role of social media in Indian politics at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The authors’ analysis ranged from how the handles @narendramodi follows fall into indentifiable patterns to just what it tweets about.
“One slightly surprising fact was how the online discussion of the election was around Modi and not around BJP,” Pal said. “While BJP has had strong leadership figures in the past, typically it was the ideology that was pivotal to elections, not the personality per se. On social media the campaign was clearly centred around the leader.”
This reflects in the kinds of accounts Modi followed:
Modi’s style of tweeting also stood out. Politicians such as Shashi Tharoor who had been on Twitter longer tended to use a more conversational style more common to ordinary Twitter users, Pal said. Modi, however, adopted an oratorical tone, Pal said, “in that every tweet is meant as a standalone message that is ready for retweeting and favouriting.”
The group examined around 500 tweets each in four non-continuous phases. These include early tweets (February 2009 to January 2012), tweets leading to the 2012 Gujarat elections (August 2012 to January 2013), tweets leading to the 2014 general election (April to May 2014) and his post-victory tweets (December 2014 to February 2015).
As might be expected, the themes of Modi’s tweets slowly changed as he shifted from his role as a state leader to one with national ambitions.
The authors chose to analyse the number of retweets of tweets in each phase, instead of the number of favourites they got.
Celebrity retweets are almost always more than favourites, Pal explained. Favouriting, he said was a casual activity, while retweets indicate a wish to propagate that message.
Before the elections, Modi’s monthly median retweets were more than the favourites. The day he won, the number of people actively retweeting him dropped off. However, by this point, he had built sufficient momentum to still have a respectable number of retweets, as with any other celebrity.
Yet retweets do not necessarily reflect the most discussed themes of each phase. So the authors narrowed down nine significant themes that they felt were broached over the study period and tracked their numbers over each phase.
As confirmation of his self-perception as a development-oriented leader, the most number of tweets in the first phase related to development. An almost equal number were about Hinduism and tradition.
The number of tweets about Hinduism spiked in the second phase, in the run-up to the 2012 state elections in Gujarat, but almost disappeared before the general election. At this point, the number of his election-related tweets spiked. After becoming prime minister, his tweets across themes balanced out, with cricket- and celebrity-related ones proving most popular.
