Political / How Rahul Gandhi's tweet trumped PM Modi

India Today : Feb 06, 2019, 10:42 AM
Congress president Rahul Gandhi's Twitter outlay for this year's Budget surpassed that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's. According to the Twitter statistics, Rahul's tweets on the 2019 Budget received the most retweets at 12,800. The Congress president had slammed the Modi government's Rs 6,000 income support to marginal farmers in his tweet.

This tweet wasn't welcomed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who quoted Rahul's tweet, trolled him and bagged the second position, by receiving around 9,000 retweets.

With 7,446 retweets, former journalist Rahul Roshan's tweet stood at No. 3 where he drew parallels between Rahul and Modi for bringing their PGs - Priyanka Gandhi and Piyush Goyal (respectively).

PM Modi, who uses Twitter extensively to share his thoughts and opinions, stood at number four with 7,400+ retweets while the PMO bagged fifth spot with over 4,700 retweets. However, both Modi and the PMO tweet collectively couldn't surpass the number of retweets Rahul's tweet received.

The prime minister's handle shared a video on the Budget, saying "watch my take". On the other hand, the PMO congratulated the middle class for their contribution towards the development of the country.

Other top Budget Twitterati included Puducherry Governor Kiran Bedi, Aaj Tak executive editor Sweta Singh, Kiran Kumar S (who claims himself to be a common man on Twitter), ORF fellow Kanchan Gupta and Zee News editor-in-chief Sudhir Chaudhary.

In a period of three-day (Jan 31 - Feb 3), the Budget 2019 received a whopping 8 lakh tweets from India only. Globally, the Budget discussions and debates provided almost 1.4 million tweets.

The highest rate of tweeting was observed on the Budget day (Feb 1) from 12.30pm to 1.30pm. The speed of tweeting touched a magnificent 72,000 tweets per hour in the said period.

While it might appear that the Congress president has won the war over number of retweets, but the competition over hashtags do not put him or his opinions on the top.


SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER