In pitched battle of social media hashtags, Modi edges past Congress

Twitter said on Thursday it recorded 45.6 million tweets related to the Lok Sabha elections between March 11, the day the elections were announced, and April 11, the first day of polling

The mainstream social media war, going by Twitter trends, is between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the principal Opposition party, the Congress. 

The first of the seven phases of the Lok Sabha elections began on Thursday in 20 states. From the day before, social media was abuzz with hashtags and posts related to elections, voting, political preferences, etc.

The most used hashtags on Thursday on the microblogging platform Twitter were "#LokSabhaElections2019", "#ModiOnceMore", "#VoteForIndia", "#IndiaElections2019" and "#MyVoteForCongress", according to a study by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. The "#LokSabhaElections2019" was tweeted 40,800 times, "#ModiOnceMore" 26,491 times, "#VoteForIndia" 24,643 times, "#IndiaElections2019" 19,049