A Tale of Two Sides: Study of Protesters and Counter-protesters on #CitizenshipAmendmentAct Campaign on Twitter

BSTRACT Online social media platforms have evolved into a significant place for debate around socio-political phenomena such as government policies and bills. Studying online debates on such topics can help infer people’s perception and acceptance of the happenings. At the same time, various inauthentic users that often pollute the democratic discussion of the subject need to be weeded out from the debate. The characterization of a campaign keeping in mind various forms of involved actors thus becomes very important. On December 12, 2019, Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was enacted by the Indian Government, triggering a debate on whether the act was unfair. In this work, we investigate the user’s perception of the #CitizenshipAmendmentAct on Twitter, as the campaign unrolled with divergent discourse in the country. Keeping the campaign participants as the prime focus, we study 9,947,814 tweets produced by 275,111 users during the starting 3 months of protest. Our study includes the analysis of user engagement, content, and network properties with online accounts divided into authentic (genuine users) and inauthentic (bots, suspended, and deleted) users. Our findings show different themes in shared tweets among protesters and counter-protesters. We find presence of inauthentic users on both side of discourse, with counter-protesters having more inauthentic users than protesters. The follow network of the users suggests homophily among users on the same side of discourse and connection between various inauthentic and authentic users. This work contributes to filling the gap of understanding the role of users (from both sides) in a less studied geo-location, India.