Narrative Building in Propaganda Networks on Indian Twitter

Saloni Dash, Arshia Arya, Sukhnidh Kaur, Joyojeet Pal

Abstract: The misuse of social media platforms to influence public opinion through propaganda campaigns are a cause of rising concern globally. Particularly, countries like India, where politicians communicate with the public through unmediated, curated twitter feeds, have witnessed a significant surge in strategic online manipulation. In this paper, we study propaganda messaging on Indian Twitter during two politically polarizing events. We collect over 80M Hindi and English tweets from over 26k politicians and 6k influencers. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identify major propaganda narratives across all events. We further use a network causal inference based approach to isolate influential actors who play a significant role in propagating the identified narratives. We conclude by discussing how these opinion leaders and their information dissemination, are central to instigating and building propaganda campaigns on Twitter.