Social media played a huge part in adding fuel to the communal fire in Leicester city (UK) that witnessed riots between Hindus and Muslim last week. A BBC journalist from the UK, investigating the incident, in a random sample, found that 50% of tweets with hashtags in fact originated from Twitter accounts in India.
“Over 50% of a 200K sample of tweets originated from accts geolocated in India,” said Abdirahim Saeed, the BBC reporter, said. In order words, 50% of these tweets on the Leicester riots were retweeted from locations across India.
Abdirahim Saeed, in a series of tweets, stated that the top three recent hashtags were #Leicester, #Hindusunderattack and #HindusunderattackinUK. But what is more interesting is that 97% of retweets for #Hindusunderattacks on the Leicester riots were made from retweets, he pointed out.
The BBC reporter also found that at least 500k English language tweets that mentioned #Leicester peaked on September 18 (Sunday) and 19 (Monday).
Further, the United States recorded the third largest tweets/retweets on the Leicester riots after the UK and India, his investigation showed. These were mostly tweeted by right-wing extremists, influencers and politicians.
Also the ‘top tweeter’ for #Hindusunderattack had set up their account in September with 1 follower and 1 follower. The tag on Leicester saw 139 retweets, an interesting observation.
This story was originally published in siasat.com . Read the full story here