Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Rahul Gandhi have lost thousands of followers on Twitter after the microblogging platform's severe action against fake profiles in November, Business Standard reported, citing a Twitter study.

Modi lost around one lakh followers while Gandhi lost 9,000, said the BS report on Monday.

The study was conducted by Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology to check the social media patterns between the 2014 and 2019 general elections, said the report, adding that it took into account 925 Indian political handles which included the user accounts of all the main political parties and political figures on the platform.

Apart from Modi and Gandhi, Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State for Home Affairs; Bhupender Yadav, National General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Anurag Thakur, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on IT also lost a significant number of followers on Twitter, said the report.

“It is too early to make comparisons with the 2014 analysis, but some of the initial trends are interesting. For instance, the sheer amount of presence (of political leaders on Twitter) this time is much higher. Of the 925 handles we are studying, over 500 are already verified. That was not the case in 2014,” Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, a professor at IIIT-Delhi and Hyderabad, told the paper.

In July last year, the social media platform carried out a similar exercise globally in which Modi's follower count came down by 3 lakh and Gandhi lost about 17,000, the report added.

First Published:Feb 11, 2019 2:09 PM IST