Tag: Twitter

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Social media platforms and cell phones are playing increasingly important roles in how people are accessing information about politics and election news, according to a new Pew survey. Photo by Esther Vargas on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.
Social media platforms and cell phones are playing increasingly important roles in how people are accessing information about politics and election news, according to a new Pew survey. Photo by Esther Vargas on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

A new national survey by the Pew Research Center released this week found that social media platforms and mobile phones are playing increasingly important roles in how people are accessing information about politics and election news.

Compared to the 2010 midterm elections, the percentage of people who are using their phones this year to track the campaigns has doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. The proportion of Americans who are following candidates and other political figures on social media has also increased substantially, from 6 percent in 2010 to 16 percent this year. Continue reading…

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Reuters/Adnan Abidi
India’s prime minister elect Narendra Modi gestures towards his supporters from his car during a road show upon his arrival at the airport in New Delhi May 17, 2014. Reuters/Adnan Abidi

In the wake of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory over the incumbent National Congress Party, a host of in-depth commentaries and analyses (as well as jokes and Internet memes) have come out discussing the outcome of the Indian elections and its coverage.

The bulk of these pieces focus on how startling Narendra Modi’s defeat over Rahul Gandhi was, and the root causes behind it. As Modi gets ready to become inaugurated this coming Monday, however, the topic has moved quickly from domestic concerns to international ones — just what might India’s foreign policy look like under Modi?

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Narendra Modi (@narendramodi)
Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s candidate for prime minister, caused a stir on Wednesday when he delivered a political speech and snapped a selfie of himself holding up a cutout of a lotus flower with his ink-stained finger after voting in his home state of Gujarat. The lotus flower is the party symbol of the BJP.

The problem is that what he did is against the rules of India’s Election Commission, the federal authority that monitors electoral processes in the country. Continue reading…

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bjp-twitter-a
The surging Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has had a lively social media presence during this year’s elections in India. Anyone who has ever combined a hashtag with “Modi,” “BJP,” “NaMo,” (a nickname of Narendra Modi here in India) or anything else related to Modi or the BJP has surely encountered Modi supporters either praising or defending their views. These “Moditards,” as some journalists have dubbed them, are generally passionate professionals who want nothing more than for Modi to lead the country, though some accounts are also suspected of being social media robots.

But an enterprising Indian who obviously has some programming skills did some investigating and found that most of these accounts are, in fact, fake Modi supporters.

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Thanks to the efforts of 13,000 volunteers worldwide, Twitter is now available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, according to a company blog post. Twitter had been working on translating and localizing these right-to-left languages since January 25.
These languages posed unique challenges for Twitter. To overcome technical barriers, Twitter’s engineering team had to build a new set of special tools to ensure that these tweets, hashtags and numbers would behave as their counterparts in left-to-right languages. Not only that, but some of these languages are spoken — and therefore will be tweeted — in locations where Twitter is officially blocked. Twitter was a recognizable force in the Arab Spring — but given that there wasn’t yet an Arabic interface, most of the users who tweeted from those regions did so in non-native languages.
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