Our research group will analyse social media discourse in the Global South through the collection and analysis of large-scale data pertaining to digital social networks and their impact.

Initially the focus will be on Twitter in India, building dataset that tracks the discourse thereon, and through this to track interest groups, understand how discourse is shaped, as well as the chronological, two-way relationship between major real-world events in India’s socio-political social life and the accompanying Twitter discourse.

Through this, our aim is to initiate a larger research group across the Global Institutes studying social media discourse and analyse social networks in the Global South, particularly where social media plays an important role in the democratic process.

We seek to broaden and systemise the research through a more interdisciplinary core-group that speaks to the fast-changing digital landscape that is being created and recreated in India with little collective memory or analysis of these changes despite the persistence of small but active digital social networks of invested individuals.

We intend to make the dataset publicly available via an online repository to aid collaboration, outreach and impact with other researchers, journalists and interested stakeholders.