Devansh Manu received his MS-Dual Degree in Exact Humanities (EH). His research work was supervised by Dr. Radhika Krishnan.
Here’s a summary of Devansh’s M.S thesis, Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Analysing the Online Political Battlefield in India as explained by him:
The Lok Sabha Elections 2019 in the world’s largest democracy, India, was a significant electoral event. These elections are conducted to elect representatives across the country for a period of 5 years and are also key to the process of selecting the Prime Minister, the highest authority in the Union cabinet. In keeping with global trends, the Indian elections saw a very prominent use of Online Social Media by political parties to create discourses in their favour. We focus our study on Twitter, collecting over 45 Million tweets, tracking more than 3,500 hashtags and over 2,500 political handles while monitoring their network interactions.
This thesis helps in getting a clear picture of the activity in the online ecosystem during the 2019 General Elections. The discourse analysis helps in understanding how the conversations were shaped on the web and what impacts it had. Understanding the data and numbers from a socio-political perspective, we see how narratives that were formed online, steered the offline world and vice versa. The network and social media analysis of the political handles aids in understanding how the political parties in India drove their online battles. Adding on to a study conducted during the 2014 General Elections, we also contrasted the 2019 and 2014 General Elections in India.