Saturday 12 October 2019

#GoBackModi - Pakistan or Tamil Nadu who trends it?

Love Him or Hate Him you cannot ignore him. Mr. Narendra Modi has this polarising effect on people. The PR team of Indian government has done an excellent job of promoting the PM's Image as a person who loves Tamil Tradition.

The carefully curated Tweets, in tamil

The  selection of food menu to showcase Southern Cuisine


And most importantly the optics, a prime minister in perfect dhoti and angavastram.



Everything is going on well where can it go wrong.

Enter the Tamilians, the villans where some of them started trending #GoBackModi

and #GoBackModiWelcomeXiJinping. Now they went even more a step ahead and trended in mandarin #回到莫迪 . The Spin Narrative : It would still not have been a big issue for PR, as it could have been credited to political opponents who are trending. The governments PR team did a bad move where they started circulating a fake Hastag analysis saying 40% of tweets is from Pakistan. Now this is something a hare brained scheme from some amateur who has no idea of Twitter and Hashtag analytics. Some news papers have also picked this up and published news reports.









Twitter Influencers folly:

The Twitter Influencers who are pro-Modi started to pick this up and trended the tweets which suspected Pakistan angle, and some regional newspapers also followed it.



Twitter users were quick to burst this narrative when people started their own analysis of the trend and further burst the myth. a twitter user made a detailed trend analysis and posted the result, which you can read here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182865025213575169.html






So what did the PR Team did wrong?


  • Simple, when you have negative sentiments towards your subject, you try to minimise the attention. So they should have ignored #GoBackModi
  • If you plan on reducing the impact do a counter narrative #TNWelcomesModi, In this case this did not work as, the trend was inorganic and most handles promoting it was from affiliates of BJP.
  • If nothing works you should be silent and wait for the trend to end naturally, it would have ended in two days, here the PR team did a great blunder and planted this story about Pakistan angle which made this trend even more popular. 
To Summarize the mood of people in one tweet, you should look at this exchange which happened between Rajdeep Sardesai and a twitter user




Edit On 14-12-2020

So I came across this new website called https://hashtagify.me/ so it offered some new tools, so I tried this tool on this #GoBackModi and the results are below.






So It settles, most of the tweets are from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and other southern states. 

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