From Rahul Gandhi to PM Modi, every leader loves a bot
An application called Twitter Audit has found that Rahul Gandhi has 49 per cent fake followers.
News agency ANI recently released a story suggesting that a chunk of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's Twitter followers are automated handles from places such as Kazakhstan, Russia and Indonesia, who retweet his posts en masse.
Union information and broadcasting minister Smriti Irani retweeted the story with the hashtag #RahulWaveInKazakh, and soon, the floodgate to tweets opened. The hashtag coined by Irani started trending all over India.
Perhaps @OfficeOfRG planning to sweep polls in Russia, Indonesia & Kazakhstan ?? #RahulWaveInKazakh https://t.co/xVanl2mKGh https://t.co/Yhl1oAGqOg
— Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) October 21, 2017
More ministers joined in. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore took it a step further by equating bots for enriching Twitter popularity to doping in sports.
In sports, this would come under ‘Doping’.... hey wait!??does ‘dope’ remind you of someone ?? https://t.co/xulfk1ENtI
— Rajyavardhan Rathore (@Ra_THORe) October 21, 2017
Congress information technology cell chief Divya Spandana went on the defensive, claiming the ANI story was "factually wrong", even as the head of BJP's IT cell, Amit Malviya, released data in excel sheets, giving out details of Twitter users from Kazakhstan who had been retweeting Rahul Gandhi's tweets incessantly in the recent past.
Why do we need them when we have you? ?? https://t.co/2lGH49maeD
— Divya Spandana/Ramya (@divyaspandana) October 21, 2017
Story is factually wrong. Can understand your eagerness to please the I&B ministry and the Bots Janata Party. https://t.co/qQfqi6jMfc
— Divya Spandana/Ramya (@divyaspandana) October 21, 2017
Congress social media head was on a PR overdrive on how she re-launched Rahul Gandhi.. She deployed fake bots! https://t.co/fjhLTjEkI7 pic.twitter.com/iHfTdcIyKh
— Amit Malviya (@malviyamit) October 21, 2017
Daggers were out, the battle line was drawn, and memes on the issue started popping up in abundance.
But did Rahul indeed use bots to show a surge in his Twitter popularity? And if yes, is he the only leader in public life to do so?
For those unfamiliar with the term, a bot, also known as Internet bot, is a script that runs automated tasks over the Internet. It is meant to perform repetitive tasks quickly and on a large scale. A user buys this service by paying a premium and gets likes for Facebook posts, retweets on Twitter or followers on Instagram. These "followers" are not human beings, but automated programs.
There is nothing illegal about it. But politics is about perception. And the BJP by Saturday afternoon was successful in setting the perception that Rahul Gandhi, the Congress No 2 all slated to take over as president next month, is an individual who fakes his popularity.
However, there is hardly an IT cell of a leading political party that has never used bots to its benefit. And so have almost all leading personalities, from different spheres of life.
Twitter Audit is an application that gives a fair sense of the amount of fake followers one has. It says "Office of RG", the Twitter handle of Rahul Gandhi, has at least 49 per cent - more than 1,85,000 followers - who are fake (figures according to Twitter Audit). In other words, they are either inactive or bought.
But hold your breath, according to the same app, "@narendramodi", which is the personal Twitter handle of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has 37 per cent followers - 1,31,72,000 - who are fake (figures according to Twitter audit).
Akhilesh Yadav has some 29 per cent fake followers, which translates into 2,88,4700 handles (figures according to Twitter audit). The account of Sitaram Yechury, the most visible face of the Left and CPI (M) general secretary, has 7 per cent (negligible in contrast, but still present) fake followers.
So who are these fake followers? The BJP has released a whole list of people, some without display pictures or some with explicit ones, who follow Rahul Gandhi on Twitter, insinuating that they have been bought by the Congress VP.
But let's pause here for a moment. Julia Eiko Maya is a latino teen on Twitter. The reason she is mentioned here is because she follows BJP leader S Krishna. Why exactly would a Latino teen sitting thousands of miles away follow a turncoat in Indian politics whose career is in its autumn?
What is the similarity between Yusuf Khan, Tanya Varma and Ravi Chandra? None of them have tweeted ever. Yet all of them follow Shashi Tharoor of the Congress, who has more than 5 million followers.
Such "zero tweet" followers of Tharoor are in abundance. This can have two meanings:
a) They don't want to tweet or put their photos or personal information, but are on the microblogging site only to follow Tharoor
b) They are bots
Likewise, @lingyi8763693 , @Rajan68299541 or @7c6f54bbc3564d7 are zero-tweet handles following DMK leader Kanimozhi on Twitter, three among the many similar ones of her over 1 million followers.
Bots don't just follow or retweet, but also shape opinions through tweets of their own. But since they do it in bulk, all followers of a service provider end up tweeting identical tweets. For instance, as #RahulWaveInKazakh started trending, an identical tweet came from different Twitter handles, reading: "Recently, Rahul Gandhi is in the news for a social media resurgence. But his popularity is fake and bought? #RahulWaveInKazakh."
The same tweet has been tweeted by a plethora of people, not even with a change of comma. Some of the tweeters, Jaimik Patel BJP, Gondlariya Ashvin, Gulrez Sheikh, are either BJP trolls or worse, bots.
Similarly, during demonetisation, Congress-sponsored bots had used the same line or joke for mass tweets from different handles.
The war of words will continue on whether Rahul Gandhi's sudden popularity is due to his recently witty tweets or paid non-entities masquerading as human beings have propped the Gandhi scion to the status of an Internet sensation.
More innovative hashtags will be coined, funnier memes will come up and politicians will indulge in sarcastic tu tu main main (arguments) to defend their party and leaders.
This is a perception game at the end of the day, and whoever plays the game better will win the mind of the electorate ahead of crucial Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections. But the fact remains that bots are used across party lines, and no one can claim to be holier-than-thou.