Congress leader Supriya Shrinate at the India Today Conclave while debating with BJP’s Amit Malviya argued that Rahul Gandhi has more popular than PM Narendra Modi as his social media presence draws more engagement in form of retweets (RT) and Likes. Shrinate said that if ones sees average likes and retweets of the BJP leaders and Congress leaders, including their official party accounts, Congress fares much ahead.
Sanjay raut of Congress thinks Congress can win 2024 through likes & rt on tweets 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/KCFWjqrZvu
— BALA 2.0 (@rightarmleftist) March 18, 2023
Netizens were quick to mock the statements. The actual data, obviously, proves otherwise. As per social media analysis website Social Blade, one can see how PM Modi’s popularity is way higher than Rahul Gandhi’s.
As one can see, PM Modi’s average new followers every day is anything between 13,000 to 26,000 and averages at around 19,000 daily.
On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi averages at 5,600 new followers every day. More or less about 25% of PM Modi’s. So, clearly, the comparison itself is flawed and one could say delusional.
Further, Rahul Gandhi is an MP from Wayanad who often tweets political tweets taking a jibe on the ruling dispensation. Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of the country and since assuming the chair he has been posting official updates which are mostly about new government schemes, his new speeches, rallies so on and so forth.
When he was in the opposition prior to 2014, the tone of his tweets were different and obviously in past nine years the platforms have evolved and social media users’ behaviour has changed along with algorithms. Further, Narendra Modi’s tweets are more like formal communication. He is sharing information and providing updates, not making low IQ political jibes on opponents.
A better comparison to gauge their popularity would be the virality of the comments they make in their speeches. For example, PM Modi’s comments at India Today conclave where he took a swipe at opposition leaders went viral and more of his supporters were praising him than criticising him. On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi’s press conference where Jairam Ramesh tutored him to not turn into a joke, was viral but for complete opposite reason. It was so embarrassing for Congress that they could not even come out and defend it or deploy their minions to ‘fact-check’ the claims.
Further, Congress leaders should ideally stay quiet on online popularity. Firstly they dismissed PM Modi’s online presence prior to 2014 and result was for all to see. Once they woke up from slumber, they ended up deploying bots to increase Rahul Gandhi’s online popularity. There have been reports dating back to 2017 that a high increase in the metrics of Rahul Gandhi’s twitter account was a result of Russia, Kazakhstan and Indonesia based bots engaging with his tweets.
Later, it was revealed how ‘fake girls’ were found pushing Rahul Gandhi’s content.
When Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter account was known as ‘OfficeOfRG’, lot of Twitter accounts with girl profile pictures used to confess their love for Rahul Gandhi. Under the tweet where Rahul Gandhi is seen doing poetry about LPG rate hike, a girl named Sunidhi Rajput is seen professing her romantic feelings for the Congress Vice-President. Except, this was a random image someone had taken off the Internet and was posing as ‘Sunidhi Rajput’.
This particular twitter account was created this September and the picture of the girl seems to have been sourced from a website called unomatch.com/desiindiangirlspics. Political analyst Ankur Singh had pointed out more such tweets of ‘fake girls’ who increased Rahul Gandhi’s online popularity.
In fact, to make things more embarrassing for Rahul Gandhi and Congress, when the senior MP had claimed that Twitter was ‘restricting’ his reach and reducing his follower count on behest of the Narendra Modi government, Twitter had pointed out that the decrease in his follower count was because of Twitter cleaning up bots.
