Twitter records 400 mn tweets in 2019 LS polls

Twitter India on Thursday said conversations around the 2019 Lok Sabha elections grew 600 per cent from 2014 to reach 396 million tweets between January 1 and May 23.

During the course of the six weeks of the election from April 11 till May 19, national security emerged as the most talked about election-related topic on Twitter, followed by religion, jobs and employment, agriculture, and finally demonetisation, Twitter India said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@NarendraModi) emerged as the most mentioned figure during the entire course of #LokSabhaElections2019, and @BJP4India handle along with the handles of their National Democratic Alliance members took 53 per cent of the mentions on Twitter.

The @INCIndia handle along with the handles of other members of the United Progressive Alliance received 37 per cent of the mentions.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi and BJP President Amit Shah were the leaders who were most mentioned after Modi on the platform.

"While English and Hindi remained the dominant languages of conversation, we saw a substantial number of Tweets in Tamil followed by Gujarati, represented by the use of the Twitter Lok Sabha Elections emoji hashtags," Twitter India said in a statement.

Twitter India said it took key steps and action to protect the integrity of the #LokSabhaElections2019.

"Along with adhering to the social media code of conduct as part of the Election Commission of India and IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India), we created an elections-specific support portal for election partners to provide feedback directly to us about issues and concerns," the social media platform said.

Twitter rolled out a special reporting feature that enabled users to report any tweets that provided misleading information to voters during the election, and expanded its Ads Transparency Centre to bring transparency to political campaign advertising.

--IANS

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