Trend Alert: A Cross-Platform Organization Manipulated Twitter Trends in the Indian General Election

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Political organizations worldwide keep innovating their use of social media technologies. This study describes a novel configuration of technologies and organizational forms for the manipulation of Twitter trends. In the 2019 Indian general election, campaign organizers used a network of WhatsApp groups to coordinate mass-postings by loosely affiliated supporters. To investigate the campaigns, we joined more than 600 political WhatsApp groups that support the Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing party that won the general election. We found direct evidence of 75 hashtag manipulation campaigns, including mobilization messages and lists of pre-written tweets. We estimate the campaigns' size and whether they succeeded in creating controlled narratives on social media. The findings show that the campaigns are smaller than what other reports suggested; however, the strategy reliably produced Twitter trends through the voices of loosely affiliated supporters. Centrally controlled but voluntary in participation, this novel configuration of a campaign complicates the debates over the legitimate use of digital tools for political participation. It may have provided a blueprint for participatory media manipulation by a party with popular support.