Social media data analysis - NaMo app

Abstract

This project aims to characterize the role of the NaMo app in shaping political discourse on social media. The Narendra Modi app, or the NaMo app, is the official app ofthe Prime Minister of India. It has an inbuilt social network in which you can post pictures, text, links. The lack of content moderation on this network leaves it as vulnerable to polarizing content like Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp. In this research, we collected data for two social media platforms: Namo App and Tweets shared through the NaMo app. We have obtained over2 million tweets (with origin from the NaMo app) and 300,000 posts on the NaMo app. Along with that, we have collected 8 lakh images posted on the NaMo app from November 2018 to March 2019. We tried to quantify the source of the Tweets collected in our NaMo app database. On matching posts by text, we saw that 80,000 NaMo posts matched with around 3 lakh tweets. We have done a strict text matching as of now, and will treat it as our baseline. Further we aim to match posts by more sophisticated text-matching methods. We will also match posts by images and see how the numbers differ from the text method. Along with the analysis, we will keep on collecting the data through our data collection pipeline.