Whether Twitter users can influence a major segment of people and their behaviour online is being studied in depth by a research team of IIIT-Hyderabad, in view of 2019 general elections.
A computational analysis of electoral Tweets, the research wants to find out if a digital analysis of public political sentiment throws up different findings and if so, why.
“Political scientists trained as psephologists have for long been trying to understand the voter behaviour and this is a complement to the existing political predictions through analysis using technology, particularly Twitter,” says Radhika Krishnan of the Centre for Exact Humanities at IIIT-H, who is a keen follower of politics.
People’s responses
She has chosen Twitter for her analysis as it is a public platform. The focus would be on issues that play a major role in Indian politics such as caste, economic schemes, and the debate over the construction of Ram mandir in Ayodhya, among others. The hash-tagged issues would be studied closely as to how people post and how they respond. Agreeing that digital mapping is a big challenge, she however says sophisticated tools that are often used in LTRC lab can actually decipher the nuances between the same word used by different newspapers or political parties. While an initial frequency analysis would narrow down on the major issues that are on the radar, a more sophisticated analysis would be done to understand what people say about those issues.
“For instance, if the topic is GST, do people think it’s a necessary evil or a political stunt. I would be interested in Tweets on GST before the amendment and after the amendment. I want to see if there is a change in people’s opinion on GST after the policy change. Theoretically, we should be able to tell if there is a difference,” says Prof. Radhika.
A couple of issues that she says could assume significance in the upcoming electoral battle are loan waivers, corruption, Ram mandir and agricultural prices among others. “Even if they do not appear on Twitter or appear peripherally, I’m going to see if there’s a change,” she added.
Explaining why she’s keen on bringing Tweeting area into the analysis, she says GST is a bigger issue in trading centres, while it might not be so crucial an issue in areas where agriculture is the mainstay. “So it’s important to focus on which city or area the tweets are coming from.”
She says the technology gap between rural and urban areas is closing fast. As per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) records as of September 2018, there were 56 crore narrowband and broadband connections in India and of these, 54 crore (about 96%) are through mobile phones.
And of these, 56 crore connections, 64% or 36 crore, are in the urban areas and 36% or 19.4 crore in rural areas.
