Joyojeet Pal’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

The structure and mechanics of organized outreach around certain issues, such as in propaganda networks, is constantly evolving on social media. We collect tweets on two propaganda events and one non-propaganda event with varying degrees of organized messaging. We then perform a comparative analysis of the user and network characteristics of social media networks around these events and find clearly distinguishable traits across events. We find that influential entities like prominent politicians, digital influencers, and mainstream media prefer to engage more with social media events with lesser degree of propaganda while avoiding events with high degree of propaganda, which are mostly sustained by lesser known but dedicated micro-influencers. We also find that network communities of events with high degree of propaganda are significantly centralized with respect to the influence exercised by their leaders. The methods and findings of this study can pave the way for modeling and early detection of other propaganda events, using their user and community characteristics.

Social media offers increasingly diverse mechanisms for the distribution of motivated information, with multiple propaganda communities exhibiting overlaps with respect to user, content, and network characteristics. This has particularly been an issue in the Global South, where recent work has shown various forms of strife related to polarizing speech online. It has also emerged that propagandist information, including fringe positions on issues, can find its way into the mainstream when sufficiently reinforced in tone and frequency, some of which often requires sophisticated organizing and information manipulation. In this study, we analyze the overlap between three events with varying degrees of propagandist messaging by analyzing the content and network characteristics of users leading to overlap between their users and discourse. We find that a significant fraction of users leading to overlap between the three event communities are influential in information spread across the three event networks, and political leaning is one of the factors that helps explain what brings the communities together. Our work sheds light on the importance of network characteristics of users, which can prove to be instrumental in establishing the role of political leaning on overlap between multiple propaganda communities.

High net‐worth individuals (HNIs) play important roles in influencing policy through their voices. Technology‐mediated means of addressing issues, such as social media activism, have become a central part of such policy advocacy. We examined the Twitter engagement of the 50 wealthiest individuals and their ‘networks’ in India and the United States, specifically their engagement with citizens' movements and policy issues related to citizenship and immigration, with a focus on debates triggered by the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), respectively. We quantified the level of engagement of ‘HNI networks’ with these debates through a textual analysis of their tweets using computational methods combined with manual annotation, followed by qualitative analysis and comparison of subjective meanings attached by actors to key terms. We found that American HNIs leveraged their social media presence to advocate for inclusive immigration and naturalisation policies, their model of advocacy characterised by confrontation, collective action and ownership by key actors, thus exhibiting mimetic isomorphism. Indian HNIs' tweets on CAA were few and far between, with no call for change and no evidence of either collective action or individual ownership, and a hesitation to challenge the central government, thus exhibiting coercive isomorphism.

With the ubiquitous reach of social media, influencers are becoming increasingly central to the articulation of political agendas on a range of topics. We curate a sample of tweets from the 200 most followed sportspersons in India and the USA since 2019, map their connections with politicians and visualise their engagements with key topics online. We find significant differences between the ways in which Indian and US sportspersons engage with politics—whereas leading Indian sportspersons tend to align closely with the ruling party and engage minimally in dissent, American sportspersons engage with a range of political issues and are willing to publicly criticise politicians or policy. Our findings suggest that the ownership and governmental control of sports affect public stances on issues that professional sportspersons are willing to engage in online. Also, depending on the government of the day, speaking up against the state and the government in power has different socioeconomic costs in the USA and India.

Data collection on the population is a key mode of public health management in the Global South. This information is seen as a means to improve health metrics through welfare programs. In this study, we examine the changes brought about by an ICT-based Real-Time Monitoring System to the infrastructure of a welfare program and the nature of work of Anganwadi workers in India. Anganwadi workers, traditionally serving as daycare providers and community health workers, are increasingly being asked to serve primarily as data collectors for the new digital system. We ask the question 'cui bono?' to this system by drawing attention to the precarity of Anganwadi workers whose care-work is standardized through this app for 'efficient' monitoring by the Indian state but remains contingent on their relationship with the local community and ability to mobilize resources on the ground. Using auto-ethnographic and interview methods, we find that Anganwadi workers are caught between conflicting demands of state bureaucracy and the situated nature of their care work resulting in forms of ambivalent care. We find that the real-time monitoring apps intended to collect data for efficient delivery of state services end up serving the state's need for performing care through data rhetorics produced at the expense of the professional and personal well-being of the workers, and arguably the communities they serve.