Twitter sees record election-related activity with 396 million tweets

Between 11 April and 19 May, national security emerged as the most talked about election-related topic on Twitter

The jury may be divided on how much of a role Twitter played in the just concluded general elections, but if the numbers are any indication, the medium was certainly used extensively for messaging around the democratic exercise. 

According to Twitter, as many as 396 million tweets were made around the Lok Sabha elections between 1 January and 23 May, 2019.

On Thursday, the counting day, 3.2 million tweets were made, with one third of the tweets recorded between 3 and 4 pm, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi also tweeted. 

The microblogging platform saw a 600 per cent rise in conversations over the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The #LokSabhaElections2019 emoji featured hashtags in not just English and Hindi, but Tamil and Gujarati also. 

Between April 11 and May 19, national security emerged as the most talked about election-related topic on Twitter, followed by religion, jobs and employment, agriculture, and demonetisation, Twitter said in a statement on Thursday. 

According to a research carried out by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi and in Hyderabad, the total number of election related tweets on the counting day was 4.07 lakh, the number of retweets was 2.52 lakh with as many as 164 unique hashtags. 

The most mentioned profiles were that of Narendra Modi (@narendramodi), mentioned 54,344 times, BJP's official handle @BJP4India, mentioned 18,834, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi), who was mentioned 9,997 times, and BJP President Amit Shah (@AmitShah) mentioned 9,099 times. 

Other profiles mentioned a lot were @smritiirani (8,658), @SirJadeja (6096), @INCIndia (5420). 

The most popular hashtags were #ElectionResults2019, #Verdict2019, #LokSabhaElections2019, #VijayiBharat, #ModiAaRahaHai, #Amethi and #ModiAaGaya.