Data Understanding:

The UP Elections are fast approaching with the current Yogi led-government term ending on

14 March 2022. Hence heated debates are ongoing on media channels all around.

For the social media network analysis, we have chosen to analyze the tweets on twitter

platform with regards to the UP Elections 2022. This will help us identify the key players and

their relationships in connection with these tweets.

Data Preparation:

We had obtained the twitter dataset using the NodeXL plugin for Excel. We had used the

Twitter search feature to import the required data. The search keyword provided was

#UPElections2022. This way, we were able to retrieve 2639 tweets in total with their source

and target values for edges (depending on whether it was a normal tweet, mention or reply).

Later we assigned IDs to each of the nodes and finally imported the Nodes and Edges table

into Gephi, which we used for our social media network analysis purpose.

Network Analysis:

The summary of the whole network with the number of nodes and edges in the network as

shown in the Context pane is as follows:

Also, the graph is directed meaning that the relationship has a direction, which is typical of

twitter data.
Degree:

The average degree for this network was obtained to be 1.233, which means that on an

average each node is connected to one other node in the network. Also from the degree

distribution, it is clear that very few number of nodes have high number of links and very

large number of nodes have small number of edges. Therefore, this network could be said to

follow the power law and hence can be called a scale free network.
Graph Density:

As we can see from the result above, the graph density is very small which indicates a less

dense network. This was expected because as we saw in the degree distribution, the average

degree was also on the lower side.

Graph Distance:

This report provides a clear picture on the closeness of nodes and how distant they are from

one another.
As you can see above, the diameter is obtained as 3 meaning that the longest among all

shortest paths between all nodes is 3. The radius is 0 here because of the presence of self-

loops in the network.

Finally, the average path length is 1.22 which refers to the number of steps or hops along the

shortest path for all node pairs on an average.

Key Players in the network:

The get an easy glimpse of the major players in the network, the nodes were resized in

accordance with their degree values as shown in figure below:

On a quick note, you may see that the highest degree values are advaitakala, archiepie11,

hiteshshankar, uppolitics2022, yusufpore, nandtara, aajtak, abshkmishra, chitraaum,

umeshdn6 and yadavakhilesh. As you can see, the list includes the twitter accounts of leading

journalists, a historian, a leading television media channel and a leading politician in UP.
advaitakala, archiepie11, hiteshshankar also scores the highest in terms of in-degree which

means they have the highest number of incoming tweets.

The below figure is a representation of the nodes arranged in order of their out-degree values.

As you can see, abhilas61339612 and umeshdn6 scored the highest in out-degrees meaning

that they are influential players in the network.

The below is the snippet taken from the Data Laboratory tab showing the nodes with highest

degree:
In terms of betweenness centrality, umeshdn6 has scored much higher than any others in the

network thus implying that umeshdn6 appears the greatest number of times in the shortest

path between any two nodes.

Advaitakala again scores the highest in terms of authority (obtained after running the HITS

algorithm) indicating that it holds the largest information about the UP Elections in terms of

tweets. Below is the snippet from Data Laboratory tab showing the nodes with highest

authority: