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Unraveling the Dynamics of Television Debates and Social Media Engagement: Insights from an Indian News Show

Kiran Garimella, Abhilash Datta

TL;DR

The study addresses how a major Indian TV news debate and Twitter discourse influence each other, focusing on BJP bias and social-media amplification. It collects a large-scale, multilingual dataset around Republic TV debates, employing TF-IDF text representations, embeddings from a neural network on mentions/hashtags/URLs, and a Random Forest classifier to label users as pro-BJP or Other, achieving about 0.91 accuracy. Findings show a strong pro-BJP tilt in topics, heavy amplification by BJP supporters, and evidence of a reciprocal information flow where social-media activity can shape debate topics and vice versa, with some hashtags predated by social-media users. The work advances understanding of digital-age media dynamics, highlighting potential agenda-setting mechanisms and raising questions about ethical governance and the need for media literacy in politically charged environments.

Abstract

The relationship between television shows and social media has become increasingly intertwined in recent years. Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have emerged as significant sources of public opinion and discourse on topics discussed in television shows. In India, news debates leverage the popularity of social media to promote hashtags and engage users in discussions and debates on a daily basis. This paper focuses on the analysis of one of India's most prominent and widely-watched TV news debate shows: "Arnab Goswami-The Debate". The study examines the content of the show by analyzing the hashtags used to promote it and the social media data corresponding to these hashtags. The findings reveal that the show exhibits a strong bias towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with over 60% of the debates featuring either pro-BJP or anti-opposition content. Social media support for the show primarily comes from BJP supporters. Notably, BJP leaders and influencers play a significant role in promoting the show on social media, leveraging their existing networks and resources to artificially trend specific hashtags. Furthermore, the study uncovers a reciprocal flow of information between the TV show and social media. We find evidence that the show's choice of topics is linked to social media posts made by party workers, suggesting a dynamic interplay between traditional media and online platforms. By exploring the complex interaction between television debates and social media support, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolving relationship between these two domains in the digital age. The findings hold implications for media researchers and practitioners, offering insights into the ways in which social media can influence traditional media and vice versa.

Unraveling the Dynamics of Television Debates and Social Media Engagement: Insights from an Indian News Show

TL;DR

The study addresses how a major Indian TV news debate and Twitter discourse influence each other, focusing on BJP bias and social-media amplification. It collects a large-scale, multilingual dataset around Republic TV debates, employing TF-IDF text representations, embeddings from a neural network on mentions/hashtags/URLs, and a Random Forest classifier to label users as pro-BJP or Other, achieving about 0.91 accuracy. Findings show a strong pro-BJP tilt in topics, heavy amplification by BJP supporters, and evidence of a reciprocal information flow where social-media activity can shape debate topics and vice versa, with some hashtags predated by social-media users. The work advances understanding of digital-age media dynamics, highlighting potential agenda-setting mechanisms and raising questions about ethical governance and the need for media literacy in politically charged environments.

Abstract

The relationship between television shows and social media has become increasingly intertwined in recent years. Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have emerged as significant sources of public opinion and discourse on topics discussed in television shows. In India, news debates leverage the popularity of social media to promote hashtags and engage users in discussions and debates on a daily basis. This paper focuses on the analysis of one of India's most prominent and widely-watched TV news debate shows: "Arnab Goswami-The Debate". The study examines the content of the show by analyzing the hashtags used to promote it and the social media data corresponding to these hashtags. The findings reveal that the show exhibits a strong bias towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with over 60% of the debates featuring either pro-BJP or anti-opposition content. Social media support for the show primarily comes from BJP supporters. Notably, BJP leaders and influencers play a significant role in promoting the show on social media, leveraging their existing networks and resources to artificially trend specific hashtags. Furthermore, the study uncovers a reciprocal flow of information between the TV show and social media. We find evidence that the show's choice of topics is linked to social media posts made by party workers, suggesting a dynamic interplay between traditional media and online platforms. By exploring the complex interaction between television debates and social media support, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolving relationship between these two domains in the digital age. The findings hold implications for media researchers and practitioners, offering insights into the ways in which social media can influence traditional media and vice versa.
Paper Structure (14 sections, 8 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 14 sections, 8 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Datasets
  4. Background
  5. Debate hashtags dataset
  6. Classifying BJP users
  7. Analysis
  8. Hashtag analysis
  9. Users posting debate hashtags
  10. What are they amplifying?
  11. Coordinated Posting
  12. What else do they tweet?
  13. Impact of social media on debate hashtag choice
  14. Discussion

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: Example hashtag being promoted at the beginning of the show
  • Figure 2: Number of users tweeting Republic TV debate hashtags over time. The blue bars show the total volume of users. The orange bars indicate BJP supporters. The red line (second y-axis) shows the fraction of the total users each day which was BJP supporters. We can observe that this fraction is consistently around 60%.
  • Figure 3: Topics being amplified by the three sets of users..
  • Figure 4: Comparison of the number of tweets for the three sets of users.
  • Figure 5: Comparison of the number of followers for the three sets of users.
  • ...and 3 more figures