Orchestrating an Electoral Campaign: A mixed-methods approach to investigate offline and online relations during the Indian Elections
Official URL
Abstract
We are interested in understanding how social media was used during elections by the ruling right wing party, BJP and the different strategies employed to spread the party’s political narrative on Twitter/X. This responsibility is delegated to the BJP’s “IT cell”, the department in charge of the party’s digital campaigning, which has been infamous for spreading misinformation and hate speech online. Through interviews and participant observation in the IT cell of a city in the West of India during the elections, we observed the day to day functioning, and the different motivations and strategies of the party functionaries during this tense electoral period. For instance, we were able to observe how the cell tried to ensure that certain topics would trend on various platforms in order to highlight certain selected themes that fit the larger right-wing political narrative of the party. Simultaneously, we collected digital trace data from Twitter which allowed us to study the formation of opinion clusters in online conversations and to assess how these ethnographically observed strategies played out. Combining these two approaches, this work aims to shed light on the effects of organized political campaigning online. What is the “organic” response of a social network to the orchestrated attempts to infuse certain topics online? What role do central nodes in the social network play in facilitating the outcome of these strategies? The uniqueness of our approach comes from combining these ethnographic and computational tools to look at how micro level planning and strategizing may show effects at a larger scale online.
Date Issued
2025-07
Publication Type
Conference Item
Language(s)
en
Author(s)
Pournaki, Armin | |
Ramaciotti Morales, Pedro |
Access(Rights)
metadata.only