Study shows how pro-BJP toolkits manipulated Twitter trends during 2019 election

Hyderabad: Political organisations across the world keep innovating their use of social media technologies. In a report “Trend Alert: How a Cross-Platform Organization Manipulated Twitter Trends in the Indian General Election,” https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3479523 researchers from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed how a “cross-platform organisation” orchestrated nationwide Twitter trends during the 2019 general election through […]

Hyderabad: Political organisations across the world keep innovating their use of social media technologies.

In a report “Trend Alert: How a Cross-Platform Organization Manipulated Twitter Trends in the Indian General Election,” https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3479523 researchers from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed how a “cross-platform organisation” orchestrated nationwide Twitter trends during the 2019 general election through a network of cross-platform “media manipulation campaigns”.  

The researchers joined more than 600 public WhatsApp groups that support the Bharatiya Janata Party. In these groups, they found direct evidence of 75 cross-platform media manipulation campaigns.

The organizers used so-called trend alert messages to mobilise WhatsApp group members. The messages contain a call to action with a link to a Google Doc where participants find further instructions along with a list of pre-written tweets to post at a specified time.

“We acquired campaign-related Twitter data and analysed how successful the campaigns were in producing Twitter trends. The results show that the campaigns are smaller than what media reports and claims by party officials suggest. Still, they succeeded in turning loosely affiliated online supporters into a manageable political resource. We estimate that hundreds of trends were fabricated throughout the elections and show that other media outlets picked up the amplified narratives,” the report says.

Today I am presenting „Trend Alert: How a Cross-Platform Organization Manipulated Twitter Trends in the Indian General Election“ at 10am in the #CSCW2021 panel on Misinformation, Conspiracies, and Manipulations (https://t.co/FuXxmvv6Ar) pic.twitter.com/RMmO6tKIyI

— Maurice Jakesch (@maurice_jks) October 27, 2021

While WhatsApp’s relative anonymity makes it difficult to identify the campaign organizers, the report provides evidence suggesting that the BJP and its social media arm coordinated the campaigns in the background.

The report included a case study of a single campaign to trend “#ModiMeinHaiDum” on March 19, 2019: The first tweet was issued at 7.47 am; by 9.30 am, it was trending across India with 4,800 uses of the hashtag. The hashtag remained on Twitter’s trending list till 5 pm and, by the end of the day, had accumulated 46,000 tweets.   

It further revealed that the strongest link between the campaigns and the BJP IT cell is the party’s official Narendra Modi app.

“The app features “messages and emails directly from Prime Minister Narendra Modi” and opportunities to “contribute towards various tasks”. Volunteer tasks in the app also include participation in the same hashtag manipulation campaigns that were organized in the WhatsApp groups,” it said.  

The report could not directly verify that the BJP coordinated these campaigns, but noted that “while the WhatsApp groups appeared informal in nature, an organization, most likely the BJP’s social media department develops the campaign narratives and maintains the infrastructure in the background”.

The report found a single phone number that posted 42 trend alerts “with timings hinting at the use of automation tools and a more centralized effort”.

The authors,  Maurice Jakesch, Mor Naaman, Kiran Garimella, and Dean Eckles found no evidence that participants in such campaigns were rewarded or paid.

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