We see for instance,the most retweeted message from 2021 from any journalist handle, which came from Rubika Liyaquat (who in fact has eight of the 25 most tweeted messages), in response to a message from actor Swara Bhasker.
Of these, Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt more or less stagnated in terms of both following and online engagement, while Sudhir Chaudhary and Rajat Sharma both had massive increases in following and engagement.Īn overwhelming majority of the most engaged (likes and retweets) tweets from journalists are overtly nationalistic and delivered with a moral tone, most from journalists whose positions generally fall on the side of the government.
The leaderboard is as follows – Rajat Sharma 9.2 million, Rajdeep Sardesai, 9.0 million, Harsha Bhogle 8.8 million, Barkha Dutt 7.2 million, and Sudhir Chaudhary with 6.9 million. In general, if we look at the most engaged journalists and commentators overall, only one - Punya Prasun Bajpai, consistently messages against the government.įigure 1: Top 50 journalist accounts based on a combination of following, engagement, and volume of activityĪ look at India’ most followed and engaged journalists on Twitter, we see that Rajat Sharma is now the most followed, bumping past Rajdeep Sardesai who for most of the last decade, held this slot. We see that a small number of journalists are very highly engaged - Anand Ranganathan, Deepak Chaurasia and Sushant Sinha. We see that there is much variance in how much journalists tweet, and turn, how engaged they are. Figure 1 shows India’s most followed, engaged journalists in 2021.
Following Rahul Gandhi’s claim that Twitter had been artificially suppressing his following online, journalist Barkha Dutt also suggested that her own following had plateaued, and that Twitter may have artificially frozen her online following, we examined the social media activity of 50 Indian journalists and commentators to understand who had gained or lost footprint in the last year.įirst, a few basic statistics.