Thread by @saikirankannan

A deep/insightful thread on the trending of #Khalistan and Khalistan-related tweets following #Arshdeepsingh's drop catch last night in the #INDvsPAK #AsiaCupT20 game.

The key to looking at these trends is to see the initial 2-3 hours period and where the mention of #Khalistan originated from.

I'm only going to post the factual analysis here, the readers can come to their own conclusions based on them, or not.

I started out by analyzing tweets only between the time Arshdeep dropped the catch and until the next few hours when the topics #Khalistani and #arshdeepsingh were trending.

In the given 2-3 hours time, there were close to 1.1K tweets that were high in trending factor and reach across Twitter. The potential reach of these tweets and the hashtag #Khalistani were close to 448.9K twitter accounts across Twitter.

The adjoining hashtags used along with #Khalistan, were these... Some of these hashtags may seem out of topic owing to generic Khalistani-related tweets by Khalistan outfits and influencers, which include bringing in a referendum for a separate Khalistan. We can ignore them.

The key analysis to look at are the emojis that complimented tweets that used the hashtag #Khalistani. Note that most of the emojis are used to laugh at, tease or make fun of. These give out a lot of insights into the intent, sentimental analysis and so on...

I was able to drill down into each of the emojis to see some of the most engaging tweets they were used in.

Providing an example here.

The key part is to look at the influencers. Note again that this analysis is only pertinent to the first 2-3 hours since the dropped catch.

This shows that the early key influencers were NOT from India but from USA and Pakistan. Tweets by them got #khalistani trending.

Out of this list;
The 1st handle is from USA who tweeted that
"This Arshdeep dude has to support Khalistan movement now, can’t go back to India after this"

The 2nd on the list is from Islamabad who tweeted that "the message is clear from Arshdeep Singh: KHALISTAN FOREVER!"

The 3rd in the list is from Manhattan (USA) who tweeted that "Arshdeep is clearly a part of the Pakistan-backed Khalistan movement."

From the entire list, we can see the analytics on the reach of each of these handles. Cumulatively, the 3 handles had a reach of close to 200K.

I also had a look at the demographics of the handles which tweeted using the Khalistani hashtags.
3/4th of them were men, and we also have an age-wise breakdown of the handles (as per available data).

Now, we come to the most significant part of the analysis.

The top 3 locations using the Khalistani hashtag are:

1. 30.5% from Pakistan
2. 26.8% from USA
3. 22.8% from India

The above results show that while many handles in India did put out wrongful/hateful tweets against Arshdeep and used the Khalistani reference, the majority of them were from Pakistan and other regions like the US and Canada.

This has not been mentioned by some "journalists" who only want to portray India and Indians in a bad light. Social media can easily be manipulated. It is important to understand the nuances.

**I will add more to this thread. I was able to do these using Python and Talkwalker.