Decoding Indian Journalism on Twitter with Data
Note: This post was originally written on our site ml-concepts.com. Use this link to go to the post.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed, if you do, you are misinformed — Mark Twain
Everyone understands the importance of free & fair media. Some people have gone further and even called it the fourth pillar of a vibrant democracy, with executive, legislation, and judiciary being the first three.
With all the publicly available data being created at such a fast pace, we now have a reliable mechanism to understand the social, political, and economic design of our society at the macro level. We can also use this data to understand who our leaders are and how they influence us and our systems.
With this post, we debut our upcoming series on understanding and decoding Indian journalism on Twitter. This series is our attempt to understand the who’s who of Indian journalism, their reach, networks and political inclinations. We’ll try to understand who are our most impactful journalists are, how much their reach really is, and where they stand w.r.t. each other.
In one of our future posts, we will also attempt to define the Left, the Right, and the Center in the case of Indian politics based solely on data, avoiding any ready-made definitions.
We also plan to find journalists who are critical of and identify the ones who are not so, of the current establishment.
Coming to the availability of public data, there is a lot of it available on Twitter to give us insights into how our leaders interact with each other and how they influence us, as well. To work on this series, we downloaded about 640k tweets containing 3200 recent posts by each journalist in the top 200 using Twitter’s developer programme.
The rank of Journalists by their followers in 2021
From the data, we find that the top 10 journalists account for almost 80% of the followers while the rest of them are just 20% combined. It becomes even more worrisome once you consider the fact that there will be a significant overlap between the followers, giving these 10 handles much more reach if they plan to combine their efforts.
It’s a telling of how concentrated Indian journalism is into the hands of just 10 personalities. Imagine the ability of these top 10 to shape a narrative or mask one; how their support can help a government or a political party in gaining legitimacy.
Rank of journalists by total retweets in 2021
Surprisingly, the data of total retweets of posts by them shows us a more even distribution with respect to engagement. tells us a slightly different story: We don’t see too much concentration in the hands of a few accounts. It means that even though the top 10 handles have 80% of the followers, the Indian netizens do seem to have a little more wholesome engagement on Twitter.
That’s it for this post! Stay tuned for the next post on our site ml-concepts.com
If you find the work interesting and want to help us with suggestions or want to work with us on the data, please reach out to us either through the comment box or email us at sourabharsh@gmail.com.