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Topical Focus of Political Campaigns and its Impact: Findings from Politicians' Hashtag Use during the 2019 Indian Elections

Authors:

Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal,

Monojit Choudhury,

Joyojeet PalAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 4, Issue CSCW1

Article No.: 53, Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/3392860

Published: 29 May 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We studied the topical preferences of social media campaigns of India's two main political parties by examining the tweets of 7382 politicians during the key phase of campaigning between Jan - May of 2019 in the run up to the 2019 general election. First, we compare the use of self-promotion and opponent attack, and their respective success online by categorizing 1208 most commonly used hashtags accordingly into the two categories. Second, we classify the tweets applying a qualitative typology to hashtags on the subjects of nationalism, corruption, religion and development. We find that the ruling BJP tended to promote itself over attacking the opposition whereas the main challenger INC was more likely to attack than promote itself. Moreover, while the INC gets more retweets on average, the BJP dominates Twitter's trends by flooding the online space with large numbers of tweets. We consider the implications of our findings hold for political communication strategies in democracies across the world.

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Budiana HKoswara APrastowo FRatnasari E(2024)Public Opinion Dynamics on Twitter: A Preliminary Analysis of Conversations Related to the 2024 General Election in IndonesiaJournal of Law and Sustainable Development10.55908/sdgs.v12i1.213212:1(e2132)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2024
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Ramesh A(2022)Algorithmic Analysis of Political Tweets: A Systematic Literature ReviewSRELS Journal of Information Management10.17821/srels/2022/v59i4/170345(185-195)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2022
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Index Terms

Topical Focus of Political Campaigns and its Impact: Findings from Politicians' Hashtag Use during the 2019 Indian Elections
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Collaborative and social computing systems and tools
      1. Social networking sites
    2. Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

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Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 4, Issue CSCW1

CSCW

May 2020

1285 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3403424

Editors:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan
,
Jeff Nichols
Google
,
Karrie Karahalios
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
,
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Uichin Lee
KAIST
,
Andres Monroy-Hernandez
Microsoft Research
,
Wolfgang Stuerzlinger
Simon Fraser University, Canada

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Publication History

Published: 29 May 2020

Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue CSCW1

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https://doi.org/10.55908/sdgs.v12i1.2132
Das DGandhi DSemaan B(2024)Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869008:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686900
Ramesh A(2022)Algorithmic Analysis of Political Tweets: A Systematic Literature ReviewSRELS Journal of Information Management10.17821/srels/2022/v59i4/170345(185-195)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.17821/srels/2022/v59i4/170345
Singh AJain JKameswari LKumaraguru PPal J(2022)Note: Urbanization and Literacy as factors in Politicians’ Social Media Use in a largely Rural State: Evidence from Uttar Pradesh, IndiaProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534845(564-568)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530190.3534845
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