Much has been said about Indian Prime Minister’s twitter following list. Quite a few number of people can be seen indulging in less than cordial discourse with people they’d identify as the opposition (which includes politicians, journalists, liberals, etc). This can be quite problematic as highlighted here —

Hall of shame — Serial abusers, sexist bigots, rumour mongers followed by PM Modi on Twitter From following the same accounts as Narendra Modi, it appears that his personal Twitter feed is filled with rancour and distortion.

So, who’re the people being followed by India’s Prime Minister on Twitter? Is there any pattern? Although, this exercise can not conclusively (and does not intend to) answer this, it still throws up interesting results.

As of August 1st, there were around 1700 people being followed by Narendra Modi of which around 683 were Verified Accounts, while the rest (~1017) accounts were Unverified. The verified accounts include mostly official accounts, Head of Governments and other such profiles one would expect any Head of State to follow. However, the high proportion of unverified followers might raise eyebrows for some.

A simple exercise of text mining the bios of unverified people followed by Modi generated the following results —