With Twitter growing as a preferred channel for outreach among major politicians, there have been focused efforts on online communication, even in election campaigns in primarily rural regions. In this paper, we examine the relationship between politicians’ use of social media and the level of urbanization and literacy by compiling a comprehensive list of Twitter handles of political party functionaries and election candidates in the run-up to the 2022 State Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, India. We find statistically significant relationships between political Twitter presence and levels of urbanization and with levels of literacy. We also find a strong correlation between vote share and Twitter presence in the winning party, a relationship that is even stronger in urban districts. This provides empirical evidence that social media is already a central part of electoral outreach processes in the Global South, but that this is still selectively more relevant to voters in, and politicians standing for elections from urban and higher-educated regions.

Social media has grown exponentially in a short period, coming to the forefront of communications and online interactions. Despite their rapid growth, social media platforms have been unable to scale to different languages globally and remain inaccessible to many. In this paper, we characterize Koo, a multilingual micro-blogging site that rose in popularity in 2021, as an Indian alternative to Twitter. We collected a dataset of 4.07 million users, 163.12 million follower-following relationships, and their content and activity across 12 languages. We study the user demographic along the lines of language, location, gender, and profession. The prominent presence of Indian languages in the discourse on Koo indicates the platform's success in promoting regional languages. We observe Koo's follower-following network to be much denser than Twitter's, comprising of closely-knit linguistic communities. An N-gram analysis of posts on Koo shows a #KooVsTwitter rhetoric, revealing the debate comparing the two platforms. Our characterization highlights the dynamics of the multilingual social network and its diverse Indian user base.