Misinterpretation of Information over Social Media leading to

Polarization

Presented by:
Haripriya Burla (EPGP-14B-037)
Nithen Sayee Nanga (EPGP-14B-067)
Souvik Dinda (EPGP-14B-107)
Virender Singh (EPGP-14B-127)
Vasimmahammad Kabirmahammad Kureshi (EPGP-14B-137)
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..3

Executive Summary…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4

Purpose and Scope……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6

Literature Review.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….7

Methodology…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….8

Data Analysis & Findings..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….10

Twitter Sentiments analysis during Abrogation of Article 370………………..……………………………10

Twitter Sentiments on Covid Vaccine and Vaccination………………………………………………………..15

Twitter Sentiment analysis on Demonization………………………………………………………………………18

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………22

Recommendations………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….23

Limitations of the study…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..24

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………25

2
 Acknowledgement

We would like to thank our Professor, Deepa Sethi for the insights provided throughout the
course which helped us do a research study on how communication can be very critical in
conveying the right and precise information.
Any kind of misinterpretation of information could have various other impacts and can be
perceived in different ways.

We are thankful to our esteemed Professor Deepa Ma’am in guiding us through this research and
providing all the necessary guidance. The precious knowledge gained through the lecture
sessions has helped us to think more practically about our analysis and to identify the insights
derived from data.

We would like to thank our Teammates for their immense contribution and dedication towards
the completion of this Project. It was a collaborative effort and dedicated brainstorming sessions
that brought insights for the research topic.
Lot of data mining and research activity has been covered as part of preparing this analysis. This
couldn’t have been possible without the efforts of all teammates.

Finally, we would like to thank our family members, who have been the support for all of us in
supporting all kinds of good work that has been delivered as part of this report.

3
 Executive Summary

Access to high-quality information and an ability for citizens to come together to discuss and
deliberate are integral elements of a democratic society. In the Indian context, access to news has
improved dramatically in the recent past. However, there is widespread concern around the
quality of online news.

One potential driver behind the deterioration of online news quality and political discourse is
media manipulation.

The basic ideology for Manipulators is to perform one or more of the following: spread
ideologies, make money, gain status and attention. They deploy a variety of tactics— doctored
photos, forged documents, viral slogans, etc.—to achieve their objectives. Manipulation takes
place on a variety of participatory spaces online, including mainstream social media sites.

Two specific types of manipulation—driving division and polarization and spreading pro
government propaganda—were selected as focus areas. Driving division and polarization in
society was observed by derogatory terms against liberals and government critics. Spreading pro-
government propaganda was studied through the portrayal of the situation in Kashmir in late-
2019 as “normal”.

● Abrogation of Article 370 was selected as one of the cases for this study. The
government’s decision to strip Jammu & Kashmir of its statehood through the abrogation
of Article 370 brought the region to the forefront of the news starting mid-2019.
● Covid-19 vaccination rumors as our second case for this study. For some time, there have
been rumors regarding the side effects of Covid-19 vaccination in the social media posts,
especially in social media like Twitter etc.
● Demonetization was chosen as our third case to analyze how major media networks
manipulated demonetization through their sources, manipulation of influencers regarding
demonetization through social media networks like twitter, Facebook etc. & its impact on
the audience.

4
 Purpose and Scope
Due to advancement in information and technology, there has been rapid growth in social media
platforms such as Facebook, twitter etc. This becomes extremely important for India because
India has now become the second most populated country in terms of access to internet. The
quality of news in India has deteriorated significantly in the recent past. One of the many drivers
of this problem is likely to be media manipulation on social media platforms which is used to
spread fake news and further increases hatred among communities. This rapid growth of social
media has proved to be very controversial because of which there is an ongoing debate, whether
the social media is a boon or bane?

The main scope of this study is to analyze media’s exploitation in the Indian context through
three different cases

For this study, we have selected 3 different cases in which the media manipulates the scenario
and its impact on online news and political discourse.

● Kashmir was selected as a lens through which to study the problem. Kashmir is a
divisive topic in Indian politics. The Modi government’s decision to strip Jammu &
Kashmir of its statehood through the abrogation of Article 370 brought the region to the
forefront of the news starting mid-2019.
● We have selected Covid-19 vaccination rumors as our second case for this study. For
some time, there have been rumors regarding the side effects of Covid-19 vaccination in
the social media posts, especially in social media like Twitter etc.
● As our third case, we have selected how major media networks manipulated
demonetization through their sources, manipulation of influencers regarding
demonetization through social media networks like twitter, Facebook etc. & its impact on
the audience.

For all the above 3 cases, Twitter was chosen as the platform for investigation: Unlike other
platforms, its data is easily accessible through the API, it is a relevant space for political
discourse in India and has seen media manipulation attempts in the past.

5
 Introduction

Access to high-quality information and an ability for citizens to come together to discuss and
deliberate are integral elements of a democratic society.

One potential driver behind the deterioration of online news quality and political discourse is
media manipulation. Manipulation takes place on a variety of participatory spaces online,
including mainstream social media sites.

Due to advancement in information and technology, there has been rapid growth in social media
platforms such as Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp etc. This becomes extremely important for India
because India has now become the second most populated country in terms of access to the
internet.

Access to the internet helps in gathering information, express personal views on various social
media sites. However, social media is also used to spread fake news which further increases
hatred among communities.

This rapid growth of social media has proved to be very controversial because of which there is
an ongoing debate, whether social media is a boon or bane?

Over the last couple of years, there has been a growing trend of misinformation (due to biases or
human errors), disinformation (fake news created intentionally) and even “fake accounts”, the
latter directly targeted at pushing a political agenda or harassing somebody online.

According to the BI-2018 survey (Broadcast Audience Research Council of India – BARC –
periodically conducts a research study to ascertain television viewing habits in India), the
number of individuals with access to TV has gone up to 835 million; smartphone penetration in
the country is at around 300 million. The number of daily active users on WhatsApp is 200
million; on Facebook, it is 194 million, and on Twitter, it is 7.83 million.

Social media is a mechanism comprising of multimedia and other platforms that are multilingual,
multicultural and are inclusive, and allow equal opportunities for all, irrespective of class, creed,
race, religion, sex, age, or financial resources.

6
 Literature Review
People seek “informed” opinions through filters only from people they trust and look for news
that confirms their worldview. This results in people cultivating rigid opinions of issues. The
features of openness, obscurity, and anonymity that once gave strength to marginalized
communities are now giving room for mean intentions to grow. Over the last couple of years,
there has been a growing trend of misinformation, disinformation and even “fake accounts”, the
latter directly targeted at pushing a political agenda or harassing somebody online. Because of
the influence of social media, people are getting trapped in narrower worldviews that are seeping
into not only voter behavior but every day personal interactions.

In the 1950s, a series of psychological experiments called the Asch Conformity Experiments
were carried out by the social psychologist Solomon Asch, to determine the extent to which a
person’s opinion is influenced by a group. Asch found through a series of trials that an individual
was willing to go to the extent of giving a wrong answer just to conform to the majority view.
The respondents gave wrong answers either because they did not want to be ridiculed or thought
of as “peculiar”, or because they believed that the group was better informed than them.
Although means of communication and engagement have evolved since the 1950s, the human
instinct to fit in hasn’t changed. To some extent, this also explains the impact of fake news
online, which is said to contribute to a polarized society. Social media is a tool for
empowerment, especially for a country like India where 70% of the population is yet to get
online and leverage the opportunities it has to offer.

While social media is facing the global challenges of information bombardment (both factual
and fake), it is also enabling communities to access their rights and voice their opinion.
Hopefully, over time, people will learn to take more responsibility for what they share and social
media platforms shall regain their lost trust

7
 Methodology

This study analyzes media manipulation in India and its impact on online news and political
discourse.
Following Key Incidents from the Real life have been analyzed through the Secondary data to
justify the argument:

● Abrogation of Article 370: Kashmir is a divisive topic in Indian politics. The Modi
government’s decision to strip Jammu & Kashmir of its statehood through the abrogation
of Article 370 brought the region to the forefront of the news starting mid-2019.
Twitter was chosen as the platform for investigation.
Approximately ~2 lacs of Tweets have been downloaded from Kaggle datasets on Article
370 from mid-2019 when the decision to revoke Article 370 was revoked. analyzed to
analyze the effect of Misinformation over social media which leads to Polarization.

● COVID-19 Vaccines rumors

As we are all aware that Covid has hit extremely badly and probably the longest
shutdown observed by humans. Though slowly and steadily, countries have tried to
overcome Covid through different ways out of which one is vaccine. This is one of the
biggest milestones in the history of medical science. There is still research going on
making the vaccine more powerful for booster doses. But all this while people panicked
and doubted the capabilities of medical science for such a quick turnaround on vaccine
roll-out.
Our study majorly focuses on the fact that people were or are concerned about the
vaccine and posted a lot of things about vaccines which are positive, negative and neutral.
This is called Sentiment Analysis from posts over Twitter. The study shows how the
negative comment or post over social media (Twitter in our case) has impacted the
vaccine brands and vaccination all over the world whereas in reality none of the rumors
or myths holds true.
If we take an example of India to see the impact of polarization, then we arrive at the
position that total double dose vaccination is only 62% as per NDTV Covid vaccine
tracker.

8
 Since the aggregate reason was the myths or rumors that were spread across public, so
below are few myths that surrounded the vaccination drive:
1. The COVID-19 vaccine is not safe because it was rapidly developed and tested
2. I already had COVID-19 and I have recovered, so I don't need to get a COVID-19
vaccine when it's available
3. There are severe side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines
4. The COVID-19 vaccines don't work because you can still get COVID after
vaccination
5. The current COVID-19 vaccines don't protect against the COVID-19 variants
6. People with existing health conditions should not get a COVID-19 vaccine
The dataset used for the study has been taken from Kaggle and analyzed based on three
trends: Sentiment count, Retweets of the Sentiments and rate at which the tweets were
made. The graphs and analysis is represented using 2400 samples of data from the
dataset.
● Demonetization:

In a dramatic announcement on the evening of 8th November 2016, Mr. Narendra Modi,
the Prime Minister of India announced DEMONETIZATION and said that the currency
notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 will no longer be a valid tender from 12.00 midnight. He
announced that citizens could exchange or deposit the invalid notes at the banks till 30th
December 2016. Also, a number of restrictions on withdrawal of money from ATMs and
banks were implemented. In his announcement he made it clear that this is an
unavoidable step to eradicate fake notes and to curb black money which was in
circulation in the country. The social media is also abuzz with discussions about the
benefits and difficulties faced from the decision. The decision and implementation of
demonetization is seen as a historic decision with long term ramification in the political
and economic future of India.

Many myths got circulated around that time in social media platforms like Facebook,
twitter. Many Government Departments busted these myths using the social media tweets
and messages and tried to clear the polarization the public had in their minds. Below are
some of them.

9
 This shows how easily myths are circulated in social media and how they make people
polarized. So, our analysis using tweets is an attempt to understand the general sentiment
among the public about the demonetization policy implemented by the Government of
India.

Data Analysis & Findings

⮚ Twitter Sentiments analysis during Abrogation Article 370

Below is the Data that is analyzed as Part of the Investigation on Sentiments during the
Article 370 rollout.
#1. Break up of Tweets by - Media and Public on Article 370

Percentage
Section (%)
Public & Influencers 85.62
Media Channels 14.38
Total 100

10
 Break-up of Total Tweets by Media and Public
14%

86%

Public & Influencers Media Channels

#2. Number of Retweets by Media reports:

Username No of Re-tweet
MichaelKugelman 2800
asadowaisi 2247
RanaAyyub 1271
UnSubtleDesi 1278
OpIndia_com 2067
swati_gs 432
betwasharma 940

Tweets from above analysis:

11
#3. Highest Tweets by Popular personalities:

12
 Against Article
Username 370
MehboobaMufti 27785
MichaelKugelman 11964
MushaalMullick 12008
Kashifabbasiary 10481
iamhamzaabbasi 12839
iamhamzaabbasi 15830
mattohafsa 11692
Username For Article 370
ImRaina 67424
sudhirchaudhary 48553
rajnathsingh 34102
chetan_bhagat 41940
arunjaitley 40178
Gen_VKSingh 29331
AmitShah 18896

13
Tweets from above Analysis:

Against Article 370:

Tweets in Favor of Article 370:

14
➢ Twitter Sentiments on Covid Vaccine and Vaccination

The data interpretation for calculation of Polarization has been done based on the keywords
in the tweets. The column name for this purpose is text. For Polarization = -1 (negative
sentiment), the keywords considered are “outrageous that”, “worst headache of my life”,
"what the f*ck", "i feel like crap", "greed at its worst", "terrible", "CrimesAgainstHumanity",
"pucking","do not intend", "unsafe"., etc.

For Polarization = 1 (positive sentiment), the keywords considered are “blessed to be fully”,
“great”, “best”, “happy”, “wonderful”, “perfect”, “good news”, etc.

For Polarization = 0 (neutral sentiment), the keywords which are not present in positive or
negative keywords like news, questions, etc.

#1. Total Sentiments as per Twitter data

Sentiment Tweet Count

15
 Negative 252
Positive 596
Neutral 1554

Tweet Count
Negative; 252; 10%

Positive; 596; 25%

Neutral; 1554; 65%

Negative Positive Neutral

The above pie-chart shows total Sentiments from the population across the globe for
covid vaccine. We can see that though maximum percentage belongs to Positive and
Neutral sentiments but around 10% of sentiments were also negative which shows that
people were influenced with the rumors that were spread though there were no such
effects as confirmed by governments of different countries.

#2. Total retweets of each type of sentiments

The above Pareto chart that as re-tweets were done there were people who still had
negative thoughts about vaccine thus adding to the total count of negative sentiments.

16
Re-tweets also included people agreeing even after vaccination were successful in
many parts of the country.

#3. Tweets count trend from Dec 2020 to Sept 2021

Date Tweet Counts

Dec,2020 63
Jan,2021 116
Feb,2021 130
Mar,2021 333
Apr,2021 46
May,2021 24
Jun,2021 35
Jul,2021 14
Aug,2021 1592
Sept,2021 26
Nov,2021 21

Tweet Counts
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02 02
c,2 n,2 b,2 r,2 r,2 y,2 n,2 l ,2 g ,2 t,2 v,2
De Ja Fe a Ap a Ju Ju Au
p
No
M M Se

The above trend shows the tweets that were done during the covid spread. As we can
see the tweets increased during Feb 2021 to April 2021 and July 2021 to September
2021 and this was the time when covid spread were severe and government was trying
its best to pace up the vaccination process. Due to the people getting influenced to the
negative tweets, many of them chose not to participate in the vaccination due to some
or the other myths.

#4. Rate of vaccination in India

17
 The above graph shows India’s total population who are double and single vaccinated.
It is evident that India has completed around 80 Cr versus the 130 Cr population. This
shows the slow rate of vaccination just because of the negativity that has spread over
social media.

➢ Twitter Sentiments analysis on Demonetization

Below is the Interpretation from the data analyzed as a part of the investigation on
Sentiments during the rollout of Demonetization.

#1. Tweets & their Re-Tweets: Sentiments

From the below pie charts, we observe that the tweets are in 1:1 ratio with almost equal
share of positive and negative tweets. Whereas the retweets are in the ratio of 1:2 for
positive and negative sentiments. This shows that the difference in sentiments is
amplified due to social media propagation i.e., twitter retweets in this case.

18
#2. Original Tweets & The exponential amplification
The below line graph on the left shows the count of original tweets and their retweets
and the polarization in numbers created due to their re-tweets. Similarly, the line graph
on the right shows how the polarity exponentially increases when the retweets of the
retweets are plotted. Thus, this exponential increase in polarity occurs due to the
availability of social media tools to share unverified/non-original information to their
followers/friends.

19
#3. The curious case of favorite multiplier

20
The above Doughnut representation shows how the negative favorited tweets are
retweeted at about nine times higher than the positively tilted favorited tweets.
Favorited tweets are those tweets that are liked by the twitter users at least once. This
shows that in comparison to a positively tilted tweet, a negatively tilted tweet finds
more audience and acceptance. While the reason behind this could be varied from
person to person, this trend shows that polarization in the case of demonetization was
focused on the negative end of the spectrum on this social media platform.

#4. Temporal variation of the tweets

21
The below trend lines of positive tweets (Series1) and negative tweets (Series2) over
11 days show that though a particular sentiment does not always dominate, there exist
six days out of the 11 days where there exists a gap between the two sentiments. This
shows that the twitter users are polarized about 55% of the days.

Conclusion

22
So, after extensive research and analysis, we have concluded that even a small rumor or negative
comments over social media like Twitter which has a wider access to population and their
misinterpretation can lead to polarization for any brand, business process, government process or
day-to-day activities of people. The evidence is very much clear from the fact that the effect of
few negative sentiments over Twitter on vaccines did result in the lowering the rate of
vaccination in India as an example where India is still behind by 38% of its total population who
are yet to be double vaccinated when world is heading towards booster dose preparation.

Additionally, we have an example of abrogation of Article 370. We have found in our research
study that there were groups and elements in the Media and Political space that tried to propagate
their own agenda of creating a polarized state.

Recommendations (if any)

23
Vaccine Tweets Dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/gpreda/all-covid19-vaccines-tweets/code

Content: https://towardsdatascience.com/sentiment-analysis-of-covid-19-vaccine-tweets-
dc6f41a5e1af

Vaccination tracker: https://www.ndtv.com/coronavirus/covid19-vaccination-tracker

Myths: https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/featured-topic/covid-19-
vaccine-myths-debunked

Article 370 Data Set links:

https://www.kaggle.com/aiswaryaramachandran/twitter-data-on-abrogation-of-article-370

Limitations of the study

Though the detailed investigation is made in the present study, still there are following
limitations

24
• The Topics of study is restricted only to India. So, the results have strictly based on
Indian Context

• The population of the study is huge. We have taken sample size for analysis and
visualization of data which may affect the outcome

• The topics of study is based on historical Event and secondary data Hence have not
done any primary data collection or data survey

• Study is based on secondary data may have some errors which may affect the project
objectives

Appendix (graphs, tables, charts, questionnaire etc.)

25
26