Anmol Panda

Databases of highly networked individuals have been indispensable in studying narratives and influence on social media. To support studies on Twitter in India, we present a systematically categorised database of accounts of influence on Twitter in India, identified and annotated through an iterative process of friends, networks, and self-described profile information, verified manually. We built an initial set of accounts based on the friend network of a seed set of accounts based on real-world renown in various fields, and then snowballed "friends of friends" multiple times, and rank ordered individuals based on the number of in-group connections, and overall followers. We then manually classified identified accounts under the categories of entertainment, sports, business, government, institutions, journalism, civil society accounts that have independent standing outside of social media, as well as a category of "digital first" referring to accounts that derive their primary influence from online activity. Overall, we annotated 11580 unique accounts across all categories. The database is useful studying various questions related to the role of influencers in polarisation, misinformation, extreme speech, political discourse etc.

Personality-centric politics has been a significant part of discussions on social media’s impact on electoral politics. In this study, we quantified personalization in mainstream politics by studying the extent to which parliamentary candidates referred to the key leader of their party as opposed to the party itself in their Twitter political campaigns. We found that the candidates of the incumbent right-wing Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, led by a popular and widely approved leader, Narendra Modi, were significantly more likely to run a leader-centric campaign than the candidates of the main opposition party, the INC. Smaller, state and regionalist parties showed mixed results - while candidates of some parties centralized their discourse significantly in their key leaders, in other parties’ campaigns, the party was more prominent than its leader in candidate campaigns. We also found that BJP candidates, rather than uniformly running campaigns coat tailing on their hugely popular leader, were strategic in the extent to which they ran Modi centric campaigns. For BJP candidates, their followers count, the type of constituency and Modi’s own approval rating in the region were closely associated with running Modi-centric campaigns. We found no discernible patterns in how INC candidates personalized their social media campaigns.