Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has over 36 million followers on Twitter, used political humour and sarcasm to become broadly appealing and refashion his political style, according to a study of his tweets by a US university.
Published in the International Journal of Communication, the research carried out by University of Michigan (UM) School of Information study analysed more than 9,000 tweets by Modi over a six-year period.
“We try and explain what makes him popular. Modi’s irony provides a form of political spectacle and resonated on social media as shown by high re-tweeting of his sarcastically worded messages,” said Joyojeet Pal, UM assistant professor of information and author of the research. According to a university release, the researchers coded the tweets into nine broad themes: Cricket, Rahul Gandhi, Entertainment, Sarcasm, Corruption, Development, Foreign Affairs, Hinduism, and Science and Technology.
After coding, they found that sarcastic tweets were closely concentrated around elections and campaigning cycles.