The Twitter handles of these supporters witnessed a tremendous rate of tweeting, our analysis showed. (Photo: Reuters)

Be it #MainBhiChowkidaar or #ModiOnceMore, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) knows the Twitter game -- how to be the top trender. To woo first-time or millennial voters this Lok Sabha election, the party has undoubtedly upped its social media strategy.

The BJP came up with a rap song where youngsters were actively seen promoting the party as they could associate with it. And to keep the trend going, the party used the hashtag #MyFirstVoteForModi.

However, the latest study by the DFR Labs - a part of the US-based think-tank Atlantic Council - revealed some interesting findings. It has found that when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Tamil Nadu in February, bots were utilised to manipulate the Twitter traffic, thereby hijacking the hashtags.

Taking the analysis ahead, India Today found that whenever the BJP has attempted to trend hashtags, some of its supporters have behaved like bots to manipulate the trends.

The Twitter handles of these supporters witnessed a tremendous rate of tweeting, our analysis showed. Their tweets were not amplified to a big level due to the very low number of followers, however, by aggressively tweeting and retweeting, they did enter the algorithm to manipulate the traffic.

We picked three hashtags in our analysis- #MyFirstVoteForModi, #ModiOnceMore and #ModiHiAyega, which had trended in the past seven days. Using an online tool called #TalkWalker, we found out the top two unverified users who posted with the hashtag maximum times. We analysed those users' rate of tweeting in another online tool called Twitonomy.

#MyFirstVoteForModi

The hashtag attached with the rap and a pledge trended on April 9 and 10. Two most prominent tweeters were @mytentaran and @ajaykushwaha_.

@mytentaran is the Twitter handle of a news website tentaran.com, founded a year ago.

We reached out to the owner of the website, Achal Kaushik, who claims to be a digital marketer on LinkedIn. Asked about this suspicious behaviour on Twitter, Kaushik said, "We generally take the most trending topics, do a story around it and tweet it massively just to increase our audience on Twitter."

However, upon finding the trending content shared by Twitter handle @mytentaran, we found that the BJP and the ongoing cricket series IPL- related content were the only tags that they used in an attempt to reach their goal. The Twitter handle hardly has around 1,214 followers. On three days, the number of tweets posted by this handle crossed 400 tweets per day.

Ajay Kushwaha was another user who posted numerous times when the hashtag #MyFirstVoteForModi was trending. Kushwaha is a BJP supporter with more than 44,000 followers. He is also followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah and many other top leaders of the party.

Kushwaha's pinned tweet dates back to 2017 when he had got a chance to meet Amit Shah. On Twitonomy, we found that Ajay had tweeted 560 times the day when #MyFirstVoteForModi was trending.

Even with such huge following, Kushwaha doesn't have a verified account. In order to get a Twitter account verified, having a link to a website is mandatory. Kushwaha has linked a bogus website that doesn't have any content at all. And he says he is from Ghazipur, Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh).

#ModiOnceMore

Another hashtag that ruled Twitter on April 10 was #ModiOnceMore. The two top non-verified Tweeters in this category were @amitsharma20482 and @Rakeshkkushwah.

Amit Sharma is yet another Twitter handle followed by the Prime Minister. He hardly has 5,066 followers and on an average, he tweets around 1,066 times a day. Our analysis also found that this massive scale of tweeting did yield 2,14,700 impressions, however, it didn't catch any engagement (tweets didn't receive likes, retweets and replies).



Rakesh K Kushwah, another pro-Modi Twitter user, had tweeted more than 700 times a day on April 10 and 11. Kushwah has 8,938 followers. He had 3,65,000 impressions on Twitter with hashtag #ModiOnceMore, however, the number of engagement was just around 1,200.

#ModiHiAyega

#ModiHiAyega is another hashtag that trended last week on April 12. @Ch_Rahul29 and @rvsharma2008 were one of the top non-verified Twitter handles posting tweets like bots.

From April 12 to 14, Rahul Singh tweeted more than 800 times a day. Rahul also has a small following of 1,098 on Twitter. Though his tweets tried had a reach of 37,000, there was no engagement to his tweets containing #ModiHiAyega.

Rohit Sharma, who has 1,415 followers on the social media platform, had tweeted more than 1,100 times between April 13 and 14. His tweets containing #ModiHiAyega had a reach of 43,500 but its engagement was nil.

Most of the traffic is coming from retweets.

One of the findings in our analysis was that these bots like behaving Twitter handles were not generating much of the content themselves, rather they retweeted most of the people using those hashtags.

On average, retweets generated 77 per cent of the traffic coming from these handles.

Cent per cent traffic of Rohit Sharma and Amit Sharma came from just retweets. Traffic generated via the retweets was 93 per cent in case of Rahul Singh, 74 per cent for Ajay Kushwaha and 94 per cent for Rakesh Kushwah.

Mytentaran's traffic came 85 per cent from replies and zero per cent from retweets. Mytentaran mostly sends replies to get into the trending traffic, without retweeting others.

Newcomers are popping in.

Geoff Golberg -- an independent researcher from New York City, US, who studies social media manipulation -- found out that there are new entrants coming in to manipulate the Twitter traffic even more.

In his scanner of 10,300 Twitter accounts that shared #MyFirstVoteForModi, 27 per cent of them were generated in 2019 itself.

What exactly is a bot-like activity?

Defining bot-like activity is a tough task, however, DFR Lab does have a view over suspicious accounts.

"@DFRLab views 72 tweets per day (one every 10 minutes for 12 hours at a stretch) as suspicious, and over 144 tweets per day as highly suspicious," DFR has explained in one of its pieces explaining bot behaviour.

Golberg viewed the bot-like activity as 100+ tweets and likes a day.

Particularly in the #MyFirstVoteForModi hashtag, 414 users averaged to 100+ tweets per day and more than 500 accounts amounted for 100+ likes a day.

These accounts might behave like bots in the definition of experts, however, they certainly are in the limit of Twitter which keeps them manipulating the traffic.

Twitter norms say a user at most can post 2,400 tweets a day (including retweets). Thus, these bots like behaving humans technically are allowed to do so.