Q. Before we jump into a conversation about your book for the benefit of our listeners, please tell us what the online effect is.
A:
This book is basically a scientific study that shows that there is a very small difference between online and offline political campaigns. We have always heard that India is a country with very diverse economies and contexts and that there is a digital divide, so to speak, in the country. But this book describes in a nutshell that digital divide, if it ever existed, is slowly closing. That gap is closing and if politicians can track what they are doing in the online space, in the offline mode, then they can actually achieve very good results that reflect each other.
Q. How was your curiosity aroused and led you to write this?
A. It was the culmination of many years of research and curiosity. Since the advent of social media, there have been a lot of changes, and it’s not the same if you talk about communication in elections, and technology has disrupted that. So how is political communication changing and how is it evolving in today’s world? We started collecting data from the 2017 elections in Uttar Pradesh and then from the Gujarat elections in late 2017. And we tried to see how we could work on something that would have a template that could be followed in every state. And since I was primarily involved in political reporting, it was an area that interested me, how were politicians adapting to this change?
Listen to the first part of the interview here:
Sanjeev Singh Interview Part 1 in TOI Bookmark
Q. In your opinion, to what extent have social networks changed the way information is disseminated? Have they really allowed leaders to communicate directly with citizens?
A. Social media has undoubtedly democratized information and data. That said, everything we discuss, even when we talk about freedom of speech and expression, has to be done with reasonable restrictions… It’s a treasure trove of knowledge that can be used. So if you ask me this question, I’m interested in the positive aspects of how we can use this data, filter it, and look at some trends and practices that can help us in the long run. Of course, there will always be people who misuse it, and so it’s necessary to regulate it.
Q. How do you concretely map, particularly with regard to this book, the constantly evolving political tastes?
A
.
We spoke to 15 to 20 of the top news editors in India and tried to get their views on the issues that were being discussed in the elections and we came up with four core issues: employment, development, corruption and farmers. Between 2018 and 2020, we tried to see whether political parties and politicians were focusing on these issues and what kind of engagement they were getting. So it brought out some very interesting trends because in some cases, some sitting chief ministers were not talking about employment or corruption at all. But on the other hand, their political counterparts were focusing more on these issues and were getting enough attention. So there was a clear trend that politicians and political parties are not talking more about the issues on which they are weak, but you will see that the opposition is talking more about them. But if the opposition is talking more about them, are they getting enough attention or not? We focused on vote share to see if this engagement that they get on this platform translates into something meaningful for them? We were able to build a seminal model that shows that if certain leaders get a certain level of engagement on certain issues, that will have a direct correlation with vote share. And that’s exactly what this book is about.
Q. I see that on the Internet, a lot of people, even those with the best intentions, tend to leave a lot of digital traces. How do you find that there is a synergy between these digital traces, between their online engagement and their offline engagement with politicians? Is there a difference in their behavior? Or are they unintentionally revealing more online?
A.
O
Online is more real-time, people have to react immediately, especially on a platform like X. And that gives you an insight into how politicians think. But you have to back that up with offline work. So it’s not a given that if you’re really good at online platforms, it means you’re going to win elections.
The other thing is that if politicians think that they will use social media during election campaigns and think that it will help them win votes, they are sorely mistaken. Because people are realizing that. So it is a full-time job, 24/7, that requires you to actively engage with your followers. And even for followers, you can just follow someone, but you can actually change the opinion of other followers about a certain politician or any celebrity that you follow. If you are a responsible follower, you can always point out mistakes, or you can call someone out if they have done something wrong, and that has an effect on other followers as well. So people have to be very careful about the kind of image that they want to build online.
Q: Elon Musk has changed the way X works. Do you think there will be a significant change or do you think people across the country will use X the way they always have?
A:
One of the downsides is that developers and researchers have very limited access to the data. Even if you have a developer API, the maximum number of tweets you can pull is limited to 14 or 15 days. So it’s very restrictive to be able to study this data unless you pull it regularly.
But what you’ll see is that people are still looking at other platforms as well… But X will still be there, because X is a platform used for real-time information delivery, and that hasn’t changed.
Listen to part 2 here:
Sanjeev Singh Interview Part 2 in TOI Bookmark
Q. This might be a good time to discuss your success in the modeling field, especially with the 2018 elections in Chhattisgarh coming up.
A:
In the 2018 elections, many BJP politicians had much more support than Congress politicians, but when you compare the engagement levels, you can see that they are doing much better. And that is also a clear indication of the mood of the people. And you saw that in the elections, the Congress won Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh very clearly. It was in Madhya Pradesh that it was a see-saw battle and it was a very close election. So the kind of engagement that each party leader had gave us a very clear idea of where the elections were going. We had those kinds of trends, but we had to wait until after the elections to be able to establish that correlation.
Q. This kind of thing has never been attempted before, certainly not in India, has it?
A.
There have been a few studies, but most of them are qualitative in nature. So they look at sentiment. Most people look at hashtags and then they look at sentiment and whether the majority of the sentiment was positive or negative. So there have been those kinds of studies, and those studies have been limited to a single election or, you know, all of India on hashtags. You also need quantitative modeling because, you know, unless you put data in it, it becomes difficult to say that it is a real scientific study that has gone through the rigor of these mathematical models. That’s why we chose the keywords that we selected, the politicians and the political parties. We put all this data together and then we worked out this formula.
Q. What is the next step in this modeling? Are you going to develop it? Are you going to improve it?
A.
I think I would definitely like to do something about that. But there are a lot of limitations for researchers on that particular platform, especially when it comes to data mining. So I’m not really sure how I’m going to go about it, but I’m going to pay attention and see what can be done, because it’s a huge exercise.
