Chennai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not very popular in Tamil Nadu. During his visit to the State capital Chennai on Wednesday, Twitter was seen to buzz with hyperactivity in asking the Prime Minister to go back. The hashtag #GoBackSadistModi was captured on Twitter as many as 68,543 times according to the French security researcher and twitter user Elliot Alderson.
Presenting a detailed analysis, Anderson listed the various hashtags opposing the Modi visit and the Tamils most using their twitter handles to pour scorn on the BJP leader. The thread attracted by his statistical tweet showing a clear anti-Modi feeling in Dravidian Tamil Nadu attracted various comments cutting both ways, but it did help establish the fact that Modi’s visits to the State have provoked such sentiments of hate.
Twitterati have been hounding the Prime Minister ever since he came to the Defence Expo last year when political opposition to his visit created a stir with black balloons and flags greeting him in Chennai. The fact that he did not visit Tamil Nadu after Cyclone Gaja swept through the southern districts and destroyed livelihoods more than lives may have led to more users protesting his visits on the social networking service.
There were murmurs of protest saying the #WelcomeModi tweet traffic should also be analysed but other users rebutted this by saying that the bakhts were behind this. The analysis also busted any theory that Pakistani twitter users may be spreading venom against the Indian PM. “To conclude, sorry to break your dreams, but no, there is no indication that Pakistan is pushing this hashtag,” Elliot tweets.
Most of the tweets emanated from Chennai and Coimbatore although many are tweets by the same users building up traffic volumes on the topic. The analysis by the researcher does prove that these are real people driving such a campaign and not bots as the Anderson analysis captured the tweets when they were at their maximum volumes - at around 250 tweets per minute to around 12,000 tweets per hour.
