Despite rapid mobile and Internet penetration in India, e-commerce adoption remains slow among emergent users. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-method study involving a two-phase user study and an analysis of app reviews posted on app stores. The findings reveal that emergent users often replicate offline shopping behaviours in digital contexts, struggle with product search and filtering, and prefer cash-on-delivery due to distrust in online payments. Many users misinterpret rating systems and lack confidence in post-purchase processes, further deterring adoption. Our research underscores the need for intuitive design, clearer communication of platform features, and trust-building mechanisms to enhance user engagement with e-commerce. We propose design recommendations to make e-commerce platforms more accessible, addressing the specific needs of this user group.

The structure and mechanics of organized outreach around certain issues, such as in propaganda networks, is constantly evolving on social media. We collect tweets on two propaganda events and one non-propaganda event with varying degrees of organized messaging. We then perform a comparative analysis of the user and network characteristics of social media networks around these events and find clearly distinguishable traits across events. We find that influential entities like prominent politicians, digital influencers, and mainstream media prefer to engage more with social media events with lesser degree of propaganda while avoiding events with high degree of propaganda, which are mostly sustained by lesser known but dedicated micro-influencers. We also find that network communities of events with high degree of propaganda are significantly centralized with respect to the influence exercised by their leaders. The methods and findings of this study can pave the way for modeling and early detection of other propaganda events, using their user and community characteristics.

Propagation of misinformation on various social media platforms is a common occurrence, especially around political events, religious beliefs, and public health. Fact checked articles, which investigate the credibility of dubious claims online, provide a reliable source of debunked misinformation. However, existing (older) fact checked articles remain an underutilized resource for understanding patterns in fake stories. We propose the use of Question Answering (QA) for analysing fact checked articles for systematically extracting metadata, potentially useful for downstream tasks such as misinformation detection, using a range of simple to nuanced questions. We find that the method gives us a context-specific understanding of common patterns and themes in misinformation, which is especially important in the Global South, where misinformation is layered with propagandist underpinning. Our findings suggest that this method can be extended by fine tuning on any event specific data set of fact checked articles to yield more robust and accurate results.

Many citizens consume information on government policies from the mass media. Consequently, biases existing in the policy discourse in media sources may influence citizens’ understanding of the policies, about how they may affect diverse communities. These biases may also get amplified further through social media if it simply echoes the biases of mass media content. We build methods to quantify media bias in terms of preferred treatment given to certain issues corresponding to four economic policies, and alignment observed with the ideological stance of different political parties. We also examine how the social media community of followers of these media houses contribute to the policy discourse. Other than being one of the first large scale studies in the Indian context, our work contributes towards creating a standardized methodology to assess the ideological stance of a news-source, and its alignment with the social media discourse of its follower community. We find that the Indian mass media exhibits bias towards certain aspects or topics related to policy events. It also provides a significantly high coverage to aspects concerning the middle class and to political statements, neglecting the aspects directly relevant to the poor. Additionally, we find evidence of bias also in the representation provided to different political parties in the media. Social media seems to echo these biases rather than mitigate them. The tools and methods developed in this work can be useful for media watchdog institutions to call out biases in the media, and advocate for more complete coverage of issues across different news sources.

Ideological biases in the mass media can shape public opinion. In this study, we aim to understand ideological bias in the Indian mass media, in terms of the coverage it provides to statements made by prominent people on key economic and technology policies. We build an end-to-end system that starts with a news article and parses it to obtain statements made by people in the article; on these statements, we apply a Recursive Neural Network based model to detect whether the statements express an ideological bias or not. The system then classifies the stance of the non-neutral statements. For economic policies, we determine if the statements express a pro or anti slant about the policy, and for technology policies, we determine if the statements are positive or skeptical about technology. The proposed research method can be applied to other domains as well and can serve as a basis to contrast social media self-expression by prominent people with how the mass media portrays them.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is seen as a means for companies to contribute towards broader societal goals beyond their immediate industrial focus, and companies are known to donate a part of their profits to social development for education, health, and other sectors. In 2014, the Government of India made CSR mandatory for companies beyond a certain level of profitability. It was observed however that many geographies in need of financial assistance for social development actually did not receive much CSR funds. In this paper, we investigate what might be the reasons behind how companies choose the locations for their CSR investments. In particular, we examine political reasons where companies may use CSR to seek favours from politicians. We find several interesting patterns and show that there might be grounds for the government to regulate CSR to some extent.

The parliament, media, and citizens, are key stakeholders in any democracy. We study their priorities pertaining to four economic policies in India - Demonetization, Aadhaar, GST, and Farmers' Protests - by examining the content of questions asked by politicians in the parliament, news articles published in the mass media, and data from social media. We find that the mass media covers stories about different constituencies (the poor, middle-class, corporates, etc.) but shows biases in terms of which constituencies it chooses to focus on for each policy. The parliament tends to focus on procedural aspects of the policies. We also find that the social media simply echoes the trends of whatever is emphasized more in the mass media, without much deviation in the attention placed by social media users on different issues. We further find out that instead of selecting issues of importance based on feedback from citizens, the parliamentarians mostly indulge in partisanship, and shape their questions based on party goals that change depending on whether their party is in power or not. Overall, we are able to use this analysis to comment on how representative and responsive the Indian democracy is to its citizens.

Policy making is influenced by a number of factors, including electoral politics, ideological biases of actors involved in the policy making process, and the interlocks between corporate and government entities. This influence is also exercised by shaping public opinion through mass media. In this paper, we study four ICTD policies in India, and explore the political economy around them by using data about how these policies are covered in the mass media. We study which actors are covered more in media, how they speak on the policy issues, and which aspects are given more coverage for these policies. We find that politicians get the highest coverage in mass media regarding discussions on policies, and that the politicians and business-persons often express similar ideologies related to these policies. We also observe that mass media is often biased towards issues related to its middle class reader base with a strong sense of technology driven high-modernism, and negative aspects of these policies and issues faced by the poor due to improper policy implementation are often not given significant coverage. Our key contribution is a methodology of using automated analysis of mass media data to reveal the factors that might be shaping the political economy behind policy making.

Corporate executives who are linked to politicians or administrative officials, or family members of public officials with links to corporate organizations, are known to build an interlocking social network that becomes a power structure of highly influential entities. Such power structures often lead to an inequitable distribution of resources and manipulation of policies. A deeper look at this power structure and the constituent interlocks can provide users with valuable insights on these influential connections, and eventually, on the shaping of socio-economic outcomes by the interlocked political economy. In this paper, we describe the design of a platform to empirically monitor the degree of corporate-government interlock in India over time, by making use of publicly available data on the web. We find that the interlock has strengthened over the last decade, and we report the kind of interconnections and structural changes that have happened during this time. We also describe the design of an application to present news articles about an event or topic alongside the interconnection network of entities referred to in the news articles, to help users get a quick view of the main actors involved in the event. We find that this news search application is able to highlight several interconnections between prominent entities in an event, which had not been reported in the media. Overall, we find it relevant to build a technology platform which can help researchers and journalists to monitor the extent of interlocks between powerful stakeholders in the corporate and government spheres.

Politicians, politically connected business persons, bureaucrats, celebrities, and highly placed government officials (collectively termed as the power elite in sociology literature) can influence national and regional policy for personal and organizational benefit, which may not always be in the best interests of the people. Media is a crucial tool to shape public opinion, and is used heavily by the power elite to bring legitimacy to their policy decisions. In this paper, we empirically analyze the coverage given to the power elite in mainstream media on Demonetization, a significant, recent policy event in India. We compare the extent of coverage given to the elite and non-elite, the policy slant expressed by them, and differences in coverage between seven of the largest news media organizations in India. We find that among the power elite, powerful politicians and political parties are given the maximum coverage in the media, with conspicuous negligence in coverage given to expert opinions. Sentiment analysis clearly reveals that opposing political factions express opposing views towards the policy, and there is variation across different news sources as well. We are applying our methods on other contentious policy events to be able to do a more systematic analysis of how media can aid the power elite to shape public opinion by giving them disproportionately large coverage and visibility.