What triggered the hashtag #CongressToolkit event, who gave it momentum, and how much of a role did influencers play in this event are some of the key questions Joyojeet Pal, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, and Rynaa Grover, research intern, answer based on their research. Pal and Grover analysed the engagement of tweets with #CongressToolkit between May 18 – May 22 by studying the tweets of politicians and influencers that used the hashtag. Last week tweets with an image allegedly claimed to be Congress's toolkit to misrepresent the government's pandemic efforts were doing the rounds on Twitter with many prominent BJP politicians tweeting about it. Things took a turn when Twitter labelled these tweets as "manipulated media." The government asked Twitter to remove this tag and the Delhi Police sent a notice to the social media platform asking it to share information that it had in this regard. This research studied the first phase of this incident when the tweets were initially shared on the platform. In total, 1609 unique tweets, which were cumulatively retweeted over 1.95 million times in the 5 day period formed the dataset. Here are some of the key findings. Note: Their analysis is not based on Indian standard time (IST) Peak activity on the first half of May 18, fell significantly after fact check The first recorded tweet on the toolkit from an influential account came from @PMOIndia_RC on the morning of May 18. During the first half of the day, ten major BJP politicians, each with…
