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The BJP swept the just-concluded general elections, winning 303 seats. Micro-blogging site Twitter too emerged victor with a record 396 million tweets related to the Lok Sabha polls between January 1 and May 23.
In comparison, the 2014 Lok Sabha polls saw around 58 million election-related tweets between January 1 and May 16 (the date of poll results in 2014). Twitter content related to Lok Sabha elections recorded around 583 per cent growth between 2014 and 2019.
Top-mentioned leaders
Apart from Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and Rahul Gandhi, regional players such as Chandrababu Naidu, Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee were among the top-mentioned leaders on Twitter during general elections.
Be it Assembly polls or general elections, tweeple have been generating significant poll-related content on this 280-character platform.
Prior to the 2019 polls, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram went to polls in 2018. Between the poll period of October 1 and December 12, 2018, Twitter witnessed around seven million tweets on #AssemblyElections 2018. In case of BJP State units, the official Twitter account of Rajasthan BJP (@BJP4Rajasthan) had the maximum share. For Congress, the official Twitter account of Madhya Pradesh Congress (@INCMP) had the maximum share on Twitter.
In 2018, when #KarnatakaElections2018 recorded more than three million mentions on Twitter during the poll period between April 25 and May 15, 2018. The Karnataka unit of the BJP (@BJP4Karnataka) garnered 51 per cent of the share of voice on Twitter and the Congress (@INCKarnataka) took 42 per cent of mentions.
In the February 2015 Delh Assembly polls recorded a significant poll-related tweets . In 2015, Twitter India had stated that there were over 10.8 million election-related tweets during the 30-day campaign period.
Twitter has been generating a considerable amount of poll-related content globally also . A Twitter US blog post said that people in the US sent one billion tweets about the elections during the period between the primary debates that began in August, 2015 and the election day in the US on November 2016.
Twitter’s data team, which tracked the campaign conversation after British Prime Minister Theresa May called snap polls in April, 2017, stated that it analysed up to 90 different topics, personalities and trends across more than 48 million election tweets during the election period.
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