Was media misled into a fake story? Rahul Gandhi's tweet went viral organically

With the Congress party already gearing up for elections in 2019, party vice-president Rahul Gandhi has been gaining traction online. Over the past year, his Twitter account has been going from strength to strength.

A late entrant to Twitter, a recent Hindustan Times analysis of three years of political tweeting shows that Rahul has outdone Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter game in recent times. Furthermore, in a three month period from July-September of 2017, Gandhi gained more than one million followers.

"We became more timely in terms of reactions, speaking on issues that were hot topics at the moment, and getting more of our members online,” Divya Spandana, Congress’s new social media head, told Hindustan Times.

While this certainly seems encouraging for the Congress, all of it was called into question today by the media who said that bots were the reason for Gandhi's popularity. Thereafter, ANI published a rather intriguing story. According to the story, Rahul's rise on Twitter is more due to 'automated bots' mass retweeting him, rather than actual relevancy.

The tweet cited in the ANI report is this one:

As of 4 PM on 21 October, the tweet has 29,792 retweets and 21,242 likes. The ANI story claimed that alleged 'bots' with a Russian, Kazakh or Indonesian characteristic were routinely RT-ing the Congress VP's tweets. On Saturday, several pro-BJP twitter users trended the hashtag #RahulWaveInKazakh. Republic TV accused Gandhi of purchasing bots and went to the extent of calling it a scandal.

Whether or not they are bots, people with "Russian, Kazakh or Indonesian characteristics" do indeed make up some of the accounts reacting to this tweet. The second point about them "routinely RT-ing the Congress VP's tweets" is definitely false.

It seems that ANI was misled into a fake news story. We have none other than Gurdeep Singh Sappal, former Rajya Sabha TV CEO, to thank for the follow-up analysis and further scrutiny of the ten handles mentioned.

"Out of these ten handles five were created/ activated just four days back, i.e. Oct 17, 2017, and four were created/ activated five days back, Oct 16, 2017, and one on August 3, 2017," writes Sappal on Facebook. It has been six days since Office of RG's tweet went viral. How did ANI comb through approximately 52,000 reactions to this tweet and come away with just ten of these bots? If what ANI is saying is true, then far more - going into the thousands - accounts should have been found and identified.

In the second half of the report by ANI, it goes on to say that the 'resurgence' coincides with other news reports of the Congress party possibly roping in Big Data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica. The same firm was in the news for the wrong reasons during the US elections.

Fake followers and bots definitely exist on Twitter. 'Bulk sales of retweets' as mentioned in the report have been going on for quite some time now. Still, one can't link the two without backing it up.

Twitter Audit

Since Office of RG's account is in question, we decided to do a quick audit of his account to see just how many of his followers are real. Twitter Audit is a third-party application that tells you exactly how many of your followers are fake and how many are real.

In all fairness, Twitter Audit does come with this disclaimer: "This scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means."

For Office of RG's account, the data was scraped 7 months and 3 weeks ago. Out of the 1,655,746 followers, 854,365 are real and 801,381 are fake, giving the account a 51% real score. Damning, for sure. In fact, with a score as bad as this, you'd imagine a little more research on ANI's part could have possibly backed up their story. In fact, seeing as Rahul's Twitter following has more than doubled over the past year, this should have been more cannon fodder for their claims.

However, far from undermining Rahul irreparably, Twitter Audit opens up a can of worms for Rahul's rivals. PM Narendra Modi has an audit score of just 37%, with only 13,033,784 real followers as against 22,003,269 fake followers. Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has gotten an even lower audit score of 22%, though the data for his account was mined 2 years & 8 months ago.