Thursday, April 10, 2014

1 Bil fighters for Mother India

Big language (English) has the biggest base in India (books, newspapers,...), and now Facebook will be joining the party as well, as the user count crosses 100 mil (currently at par with the USA) with a goal of reaching 1 Billion.

And for now at least, the Hindu Great Man (HGM) is the second most liked politician on the planet (only Barrack Hussein Obama comes out ahead) and has hundred times the followers than what the Young Prince can claim.

Prima facie this appears to be a pure and simple conspiracy by the capitalist pigs and it will be good to hear from Arundhati Roy as to how the evil americans are enabling the spread of (hindutva inspired) fascism in India (see below).
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The scale of the Indian elections is also an enormous opportunity for Facebook, which recently announced its ambitions to reach 1 billion users in India. Already, India is the only country aside from the United States where Facebook’s consumer base exceeds 100 million, and it’s certainly the only country in the world where Facebook can hope to corral 1 billion new users.


“Of the 800+ million people eligible to vote in India, 170 million of them are on the Internet and well over half of Internet users in India are using Facebook,” Facebook spokesperson Andrew Stone told BuzzFeed in an email. “In fact, you may have seen that just this morning we made the announcement about having reached 100 million active Facebook users in India.”

In early March when the elections were first announced, Facebook India launched an election tracker that tracks mentions of the leading candidates and parties, ranking them from most mentioned to least. This is modeled after a similar app Facebook launched in the United States during the 2012 presidential elections.




As of Wednesday, the top of the Facebook India homepage now features an “I’m a Voter” button, which will remain visible for the duration of the Indian elections. Clicking it allows users to share with all of their friends that they voted. The visibility of this button is contingent on voting eligibility; it is only visible to Facebook users over the age of 18, and only on days when voting is taking place in the region they are in.


The idea is to drive Indians to the polling stations. A UC San Diego study during the 2012 U.S. presidential elections found that social pressures, specifically on social networks and specifically from close connections, are a major influence on whether individuals vote or not. Although 4% of Facebook users who clicked the “I voted” button on Facebook admitted to not actually having voted, rates of voting were highest among those who had seen a message seeing that their friends had voted — particularly close friends.


In an election already historic for its scale, this Facebook initiative might — this is the hope — increase voter turnout by acting as a multiplier.




Narendra Modi, one of of India’s two front-running prime ministerial candidates, has more than 12 million likes on his Facebook page (having gained 48,555 in the last day alone, at the time of writing). Among global politicians’ Facebook popularity, that number ranks him second only to President Barack Obama. In the last week, Facebook pages for Indian politicians and parties have garnered likes faster than any other political pages worldwide.




Even at a rudimentary glance, Facebook’s electoral data illustrates that Modi is more talked about than his primary challenger Rahul Gandhi among India’s Facebook users, i.e., among India’s educated youth. The data also suggests Modi’s fan base extends far beyond the more conservative and older demographic that he has conventionally been associated with.

Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi has less than a 100th of Modi’s Facebook following, and doesn’t even exist on Twitter. (Modi has more than 3.5 million Twitter followers.)




Only about an eighth of eligible Indian voters are on Facebook — a figure the company is aiming to change — and only 74% of India is even literate. Harbath said Facebook is not discouraged by that fact. “Conversations aren’t restricted to Facebook. People might be conversing with candidates or political parties on Facebook, but they are continuing those conversations in their communities, with their friends and neighbors … It ends up being a lot of conversations on the ground.” And of course, some of those conversations may translate into new users.
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regards

1 comment:

  1. Result of this fight for mother India will declared on 16th of may 2014.

    ReplyDelete