Between February 14, 2019 and March 4, 2019, a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir followed by retaliatory airstrikes led to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries. In this work, we examine polarizing messaging on Twitter during these events, particularly focusing on the positions of Indian and Pakistani politicians. We use a label propagation technique focused on hashtag co-occurrences to find polarizing tweets and users. Our analysis reveals that politicians in the ruling political party in India (BJP) used polarized hashtags and called for escalation of conflict more so than politicians from other parties. Our work offers the first analysis of how escalating tensions between India and Pakistan manifest on Twitter and provides a framework for studying polarizing messages.
Media outlets and political campaigners recognise social media as a means for widely disseminating news and opinions. In particular, Twitter is used by political groups all over the world to spread political messages, engage their supporters, drive election campaigns, and challenge their critics. Further, news agencies, many of which aim to give an impression of balance, are often of a particular political persuasion which is reflected in the content they produce. Driven by the potential for political and media organisations to influence public opinion, our aim is to quantify the nature of pol…
IndRegBias: A Dataset for Studying Indian Regional Biases in English and Code-Mixed Social Media Comments
Department of Data Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research（数据科学与工程系，印度科学教育与研究学院）；Oracle Industries AI, Oracle Corporation（Oracle人工智能部，Oracle公司）
Influencers play a crucial role in shaping public narratives through information creation and diffusion in the Global South. While public figures from various walks of life and their impact on public discourse have been studied, defence veterans as influencers of the political discourse have been largely overlooked. Veterans matter in the public spehere as a normatively important political lobby. They are also interesting because, unlike active-duty military officers, they are not restricted from taking public sides on politics, so their posts may provide a window into the views of those still…
In recent past online social media has played a pivotal role in sharing of information and opinions on real time events. Events in physical space are reflected in digital world through online social networks. Event based studies for such content have been widely done on Twitter in the computer science community. In this report, we performed a detailed analysis of a sports event called the Indian Premier League (IPL'13) for both Facebook and Twitter. IPL is the most popular cricket league in India with players from across the world. We analysed more than 2.6 million tweets and 700 thousand Face…
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 …
Political organizations worldwide keep innovating their use of social media technologies. In the 2019 Indian general election, organizers used a network of WhatsApp groups to manipulate Twitter trends through coordinated mass postings. We joined 600 WhatsApp groups that support the Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing party that won the general election, to investigate these campaigns. We found evidence of 75 hashtag manipulation campaigns in the form of mobilization messages with lists of pre-written tweets. Building on this evidence, we estimate the campaigns' size, describe their organiza…
A tweet from popular entertainer and businesswoman, Rihanna, bringing attention to farmers' protests around Delhi set off heightened activity on Indian social media. An immediate consequence was the weighing in by Indian politicians, entertainers, media and other influencers on the issue. In this paper, we use data from Twitter and an archive of debunked misinformation stories to understand some of the patterns around influencer engagement with a political issue. We found that more followed influencers were less likely to come out in support of the tweet. We also find that the later engagement…
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant ramifications for international relations ranging from travel restrictions, global ceasefires, and international vaccine production and sharing agreements. Amidst a wave of infections in India that resulted in a systemic breakdown of healthcare infrastructure, a social welfare organization based in Pakistan offered to procure medical-grade oxygen to assist India -- a nation which was involved in four wars with Pakistan in the past few decades. In this paper, we focus on Pakistani Twitter users' response to the ongoing healthcare crisis in I…
Emerged in Wuhan city of China in December 2019, COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the world despite authorities having made available a number of vaccines. While the coronavirus has been around for a significant period of time, people and authorities still feel the need for awareness due to the mutating nature of the virus and therefore varying symptoms and prevention strategies. People and authorities resort to social media platforms the most to share awareness information and voice out their opinions due to their massive outreach in spreading the word in practically no time. Peopl…
People turn to search engines and social media to seek information during population-level events, such as during civil unrest, disease outbreaks, fires, or flood. They also tend to participate in discussions and disseminate information and opinions via social media forums, and smartphone messaging applications. COVID-19 pandemic was not any different. However, the proper medical awareness and correct information dissemination is critical during a pandemic. An unprecedented amount of internet traffic related to this topic was generated during the start of the pandemic all over the world. In th…
IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Mallya Aditi International School（马利亚阿迪蒂国际学校）
Since its outbreak, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented losses to human lives and economies around the world. As of 18th July 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported more than 13 million confirmed cases including close to 600,000 deaths across 216 countries and territories. Despite several government measures, India has gradually moved up the ranks to become the third worst-hit nation by the pandemic after the US and Brazil, thus causing widespread anxiety and fear among her citizens. As majority of the world's population continues to remain confined to their …
Social media has grown exponentially in a short period, coming to the forefront of communications and online interactions. Despite their rapid growth, social media platforms have been unable to scale to different languages globally and remain inaccessible to many. In this paper, we characterize Koo, a multilingual micro-blogging site that rose in popularity in 2021, as an Indian alternative to Twitter. We collected a dataset of 4.07 million users, 163.12 million follower-following relationships, and their content and activity across 12 languages. We study the user demographic along the lines o…
Volume of content and misinformation on social media is rapidly increasing. There is a need for systems that can support fact checkers by prioritizing content that needs to be fact checked. Prior research on prioritizing content for fact-checking has focused on news media articles, predominantly in English language. Increasingly, misinformation is found in user-generated content. In this paper we present a novel dataset that can be used to prioritize check-worthy posts from multi-media content in Hindi. It is unique in its 1) focus on user generated content, 2) language and 3) accommodation of…
The broad adoption of the web as a communication medium has made it possible to study social behavior at a new scale. With social media networks such as Twitter, we can collect large data sets of online discourse. Social science researchers and journalists, however, may not have tools available to make sense of large amounts of data or of the structure of large social networks. In this paper, we describe our recent extensions to Truthy, a system for collecting and analyzing political discourse on Twitter. We introduce several new analytical perspectives on online discourse with the goal of fac…
The suicide of Indian actor Sushant Singh Rajput in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown triggered a media frenzy of prime time coverage that lasted several months and became a political hot button issue. Using data from Twitter, YouTube, and an archive of debunked misinformation stories, we found two important patterns. First, that retweet rates on Twitter clearly suggest that commentators benefited from talking about the case, which got higher engagement than other topics. Second, that politicians, in particular, were instrumental in changing the course of the discourse by referring to the cas…
Scholarly articles are now increasingly being mentioned and discussed in social media platforms, sometimes even as pre- or post-print version uploads. Measures of social media mentions and coverage are now emerging as an alternative indicator of impact of scholarly articles. This article aims to explore how much scholarly research output from India is covered in different social media platforms, and how similar or different it is from the world average. It also analyses the discipline-wise variations in coverage and altmetric attention for Indian research output, including a comparison with th…
The pandemic required efficient allocation of public resources and transforming existing ways of societal functions. To manage any crisis, governments and public health researchers exploit the information available to them in order to make informed decisions, also defined as situational awareness. Gathering situational awareness using social media has been functional to manage epidemics. Previous research focused on using discussions during periods of epidemic crises on social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook and developing NLP techniques to filter out relevant discussions fro…
With the ubiquitous reach of social media, influencers are increasingly central to articulation of political agendas on a range of topics. We curate a sample of tweets from the 200 most followed sportspersons in India and the United States respectively since 2019, map their connections with politicians, and visualize their engagements with key topics online. We find significant differences between the ways in which Indian and US sportspersons engage with politics online-while leading Indian sportspersons tend to align closely with the ruling party and engage minimally in dissent, American spor…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
Social media has been on the vanguard of political information diffusion in the 21st century. Most studies that look into disinformation, political influence and fake-news focus on mainstream social media platforms. This has inevitably made English an important factor in our current understanding of political activity on social media. As a result, there has only been a limited number of studies into a large portion of the world, including the largest, multilingual and multi-cultural democracy: India. In this paper we present our characterisation of a multilingual social network in India called…
Influencers are key to the nature and networks of information propagation on social media. Influencers are particularly important in political discourse through their engagement with issues, and may derive their legitimacy either solely or in large part through online operation, or have an offline sphere of expertise such as entertainers, journalists etc. To quantify influencers' political engagement and polarity, we use Google's Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) to encode the tweets of 6k influencers and 26k Indian politicians during political crises in India. We then obtain aggregate vector r…
The Uli Dataset: An Exercise in Experience Led Annotation of oGBV
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Tattle Civic Tech（塔特尔公民科技）；Bebaak Collective（贝巴克集体）；National Council of Women Leaders（全国女性领袖委员会）；Chambal Media/Khabar Lahariya（昌巴尔媒体/赫拉哈里亚新闻）；Center for Internet and Society（互联网与社会中心）
The complex topology of real networks allows its actors to change their functional behavior. Network models provide better understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms being accountable for the growth of such networks by capturing the dynamics in the ways network agents interact and change their behavior. Considerable amount of research efforts is required for developing novel network modeling techniques to understand the structural properties such networks, reproducing similar properties based on empirical evidence, and designing such networks efficiently. First, we demonstrate how to constru…
