An argument over a parking spot turned ugly in Old Delhi on the evening of July 1; this morning’s papers carried the news on their inside pages. There were reports of vandalism at a local temple, the police and local politicians urged residents to remain calm.

Then early this morning, Twitter suddenly lit up with a deluge of tweets clustered around #TempleTerrorAttack. In a five minute period at noon on July 2 2019, a storm of just 500 tweets with this hashtag reached a potential audience of 300,000 accounts. The hashtag started in the morning and continues to grow at the same frenetic speed.


At the time of publication, on the afternoon of July 2, #TempleTerrorAttack was the top trend on Twitter with nearly 80,000 tweets, followed by #ChandiniChowk, the Delhi street where the incident occurred, #TempleDestroyed (which is factually incorrect) and #TempleAttacked.

How did a local incident in Delhi take over Twitter?

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A preliminary analysis suggests the Twitter storm is a mix of a few influencers with large followings, and frenetic activity by accounts with barely any followers who churned out hundreds of tweets — suggesting what Twitter and Facebook call “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”.


HuffPost India’s early findings are restricted to real-time trends analysis using tools like Hashtagify, Socialert, TweetBinder, and TweetReach, that parse the deluge of Twitter traffic for insights.

While the findings are not exhaustive, early analysis in real-time reinforces a common criticism of Twitter: The platform is optimised for virality, leaving it vulnerable to campaigns of the sort perfected by India’s ruling political party the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose party members and supporters are adept at leveraging a network of supporters, paid contractors, political consultancies and bot accounts, to dominate the national news cycle.


For instance, one of the most popular accounts to tweet about the incident, amongst the tweets sampled by HuffPost India, is @Punitspeaks, the account of Punit Agarwal, the head of the Social Media and IT Cell of BJP’s Delhi unit. Although he did not seem to tweet anything directly, Agarwal used his popular account to signal boost multiple posts on the topic.

His strategy, as befits a man adept at social media virality, seems to make sense: At the time of sampling, only 22.4% of the Twitter traffic around #TempleTerrorAttack were posts, 71.9% were re-tweets.