Social media beyond voter mobilisation

In his first tweets after the polls closed on 12 May, Narendra Modi provided a glimpse of the rapid development of social media in India. “Wherever I went it was a delight to interact with the local people”, Mr. Modi tweeted. “Social media helped me understand their sentiments”. Though used as a channel to mobilise support and woo potential voters, Mr. Modi’s statement also highlights the trend of using social media as a provider of big data about voters, which parties analyse and act upon.

Social media has allowed parties to promote their candidates and engage with voters – for instance, through video discussions on Google Hangout. Mr. Modi now has around 4.7 million followers on Twitter and over 17 million fans on Facebook, and those not part of this universe are still reached, through the messaging service WhatsApp and text messages.

According to an article in the India Today newsmagazine, the total number of Indians on the main social media channels equals the number of BJP and Congress voters in 2009 – almost 200 million.

The article throws up another interesting data point: that from 1 January 2014 till the seventh round of polling, there were 49 million tweets related to the Indian elections – about two and a half times the 20 million tweets for all of 2013. By the time the polls closed on May 12, this number had gone up further: to 56 million election-related tweets.

Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising that several media outlets quickly called the recent ballots ‘India’s first social media election’.

A similar development took place during the 2012 U.S. elections, when more tweets were sent every two days “than had ever been sent prior to Election Day 2008”, as stated on Twitter at that point. On Election Day 2012 alone, there were 31 million tweets related to the event.

However, what these and similar articles mostly fail to point out, and what Mr Modi got right, is the novelty of social media being used as a source of big data in the Indian elections, providing insights about what voters think, feel and want. Social media has thus become a real-time barometer of the electorate’s moods, albeit a somewhat skewed one because of the demographics of its users, who tend to be young and urban.

This information then informs the campaigns. Indeed, by analysing tweets, status messages, posts, likes and so on, tech-savvy aides are able to help “raise funds, rework advertisements and create detailed models for voter engagement in swing states, as well as for gender-based and minority voter clusters, increasing the power of the strategy of micro-targeting”, says Neerja Pawha Jetley in an article on CNBC.

Insights from social media analysis allow parties to fine tune their campaigns by adapting the message to the audience, and thereby convincing it more efficiently and effectively.

Availability of off-the-shelf solutions to analyse data generated by social media, alongside the growing number of companies that provide this analysis for money, is speeding up the use of big data in political analysis.

This is quite visible with online news outlets, which have added social media analytics to their websites. For instance, the Times of India, with support from Frrole, provides a platform to track the sentiment about candidates on social media.

Quite a few platforms are open source, which makes them easy to tailor to specific contexts. A large community of coders and data scientists ensures their continuous development. Twitter’s API – the application programming interface, which allows other applications to download tweets for analytics – is free for all to use.

These developments have democratised big data and brought it from the exclusive realm of spy agencies and the military, to marketing, politics and other fields.

Now that the polls are closed, pundits should team up with data scientists and make use of the spectacular volume of data generated, to develop our understanding of the elections and the dynamics of Indian political life. Of course, once detailed results are published, more accurate data about voting per se will be available to draw upon.

Those who use social media data for exit polls only make limited use of its potential as a source of information. Rather, greater value lies in the fact that tweets and the like provide insights about people’s concerns and how they feel about political issues.

Naturally, one potential analysis based on this material could address the question of narratives, dealt with extensively in the field of cultural studies.

Social media messages, analysed automatically using appropriate tools based on developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, could provide valuable insights into how people frame issues of interest. How, for instance, do people perceive economic growth – is it seen as growth for the sake of growth, or is it growth that lifts people out of poverty? What are the associations made, what are the relations between ideas?

Social media analyses also fosters understanding of the Indian diaspora, its patterns of engagement with the population at home – for instance through analysing replies and retweets – and its narratives about issues debated in the elections. Are these issues the same or different? Or are the same issues framed differently? Most importantly, it could provide an insight into the different narratives about India – ‘the idea(s) of India’ – constructed and communicated by candidates and voters alike.

Ultimately, these observations bear implications for the field of political science. We will quite likely now see political scientists with some background in coding, besides those with a more traditional profile.

While big data may not necessarily lead to radically new realisations, it will certainly support analyses with additional qualitative resources.

Radu Nikolaus Botez uses social media analysis techniques in his research for @asylos_. He holds a Masters degrees in International Security (Sciences Po Paris) and South Asian Area Studies (SOAS, University of London). He is writing here in his personal capacity

This article was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. You can read more exclusive content here.

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