A fascinating Trend of #SushantSinghRajput
Unless you have been living under a rock or anywhere around one, you must have noticed a dark yet fascinating trend of #SushantSinghRajput on social media platforms especially Twitter, the most political one. This trend began at the peak of the first wave of Covid-19 in India, right after the unfortunate demise of Sushant Singh Rajput, an up-and-coming actor in Bollywood when alive, may his soul rest in peace in heaven.
I personally started to notice when it used to trend on Twitter and sometimes still does to this day for that matter, mostly when there is a separate hashtag trending against the ruling party at the centre. Amused by the timing, I started going through a few samples of these accounts and found that they seem to be dedicated only to the cause of Shushant. A lot of them have Sushant or SSR (short name) mentioned in their description, sometimes even in their names. These accounts do not talk about any other topics in general and revolve mostly around the cause.
Description of @HeliPandya_SR
Here for the campaign for Justice for SSR 💔My team Aayush, Sandy mom , Khushi,Satya , Ashu, Anushka , Profy Bro , Vishal Bro,Simiji — gang I love most ♥️\U0001faf6💕
Description of @nuthan_ch
I’m Proud SSRian💕\n⚖ For SSR & Disha
Some of them even have his photograph as their profile picture (DP)
Snapshot of @ssr_flower
Snapshot of @SsrSatya
Please note that I too want justice for him if he had to face things that the media has been talking about, but these observations made me curious, to say the least. I started smelling a foul-play.
Finally, after almost 2 years have gone by, I have decided to look into the data and share my findings with the world. For this post, I started by downloading about 2,700 tweets containing #SushantSinghRajput.
About 1000 distinct users were found present among these 2,700 tweets. The first plot is the histogram/count of these Twitter accounts by their creation time. It’s clear that there are a lot of new accounts created since June 2020, the month of his death. This phenomenon seems to continue and hasn’t stopped even by now!
A significant 31% of these 1000 accounts have SSR or Sushant present in either their names or their descriptions indicating how dedicated these accounts are to just the SSR topic, almost like they are bots created only for this purpose only.
I will be going deeper into this in the second part of this article. Please let me know in the comments or DM me how you found the article, and what you think I should cover in its second part.
If you like this article, then you should check out my site https://ml-concepts.com where I plan to add such data-driven articles.
