The Bharatiya Janata Party’s chief ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal was the most talked about politician in Assam during the Assembly elections in the social media. This was revealed by Facebook on Wednesday.
“From January 1 to April 1, 35 million people have engaged in conversations related to the state assembly elections in India. In Assam, the BJP was the most talked about party, followed by the Congress. Sarbananda Sonowal was the most talked about politician in Assam, followed by PM Narendra Modi and Tarun Gogoi,” a Facebook statement said.
According to the Assam elections related data released by the social network, Sarbananda Sonowal gathered 40% of the mentions followed by Narendra Modi with 29% and Tarun Gogoi with 26% mentions.
“Candidates are using Facebook to reach out to citizens directly and personally. They are having unfiltered conversations about important public policy issues and getting honest feedback from voters. Since the start of the year, globally 35 million people have participated in state assembly election-related conversations on Facebook, and 19.2 million in India. We’ve seen a large volume of video content being used by politicians to engage with their constituencies,” said Ankhi Das, public policy director at Facebook India, South and Central Asia.
Facebook defined election-related conversation as any post or comment that contains highly specific and targeted keywords or hashtags related to either the election itself, a candidate, a party, or a specific topic that might be playing a large role in the election.
Interestingly, data revealed by Facebook showed that males in the age group of 18-24 were more involved in election-related conversation whereas the females in the same age group were also seen taking keen interest in the subject. The top demographics were males between 18-24 years of age followed by males between 25-34 years and then by females between 18-24 years.
Google on Tuesday released interesting search–based insights revealing that Assam was the most searched state among the five undergoing Assembly polls. BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma was the most searched politician, according to a release issued by the search engine.
