Trending Hashtags: Social Media Campaigning and Issue Prevalence

• In Event: Political Campaigning, Elite Discourse and Political Engagement

Abstract

Using social media during election campaigns has become standard practice in many democracies. This is suggestive of the growing user base and information-seeking behavior on social media platforms. Although studies have explored the characteristics of these campaigns, such as the reach and engagement they garnered, the question of whether social media by itself can win an election is still highly debated. Data-driven campaigns seek to reach a larger audience by leveraging the content and algorithmic push given by social media platforms, especially the usage of hashtags to boost the popularity of a topic or issue and turn it into a “trending hashtag”. Moreover, trending hashtags not only increase the reach of content, but they also attract the attention of mainstream media.

Research on trending hashtags, social media and issue prevalence—especially from the global south, where social media is widely utilized for online campaigning—has been limited. With more than 900 million voters registered, India has a large social media userbase, particularly on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It is interesting to note that, with just over 17 million users, Twitter (now X) has been one of the platforms that generates intense party competition and media attention. In light of these factors, the Indian general election of 2019 was referred to as the first social media election. Therefore, in this study, we analyze the top trending hashtags on Twitter during the election period to understand the party competition, campaign strategy and issue prevalence.

We used the Twitter API to collect Tweets based on top-trending hashtags daily. The data was collected between March 1st and May 20th, 2019, covering the pre-campaign, campaign, and seven-phased election period. We found 5.9 million tweets relating to 493 unique hashtags that were trending during the 2019 election. After cleaning the data, we got 3.4 million tweets from 428,350 different Twitter users, comprising political leaders, partisans, and activists. Many of these tweets had more than one hashtag, which suggests the campaign strategy by political parties in trending the topic/issue. Over 1.28 million (37.7%) tweets had one hashtag, 20.1% had two hashtags, and 13.3% had three hashtags, with the lowest being one and the most being 41 hashtags. Further, this study will identify the issues that are prevalent in these hashtags, as well as classify the hashtags based on political parties and how users engaged with different posts (retweets, likes, and replies), using a negative binomial regression model. Additionally, the study uses an unsupervised topic model to the text of the tweets to determine whether the content (topic) and hashtags are similar or different. This sheds more light on the party’s strategy to disseminate attacking or self-promoting narratives. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding social media strategies employed by political parties and their affiliates to trend hashtags as a campaigning tool, attracting the attention of users and mainstream media.

Authors

• Kiran Arabaghatta Basavaraj, University College London

• Yixuan Huang