Abstract: Users on Twitter are identified with the help of their profile attributes that consists of username, display name, profile image, to name a few. The profile attributes that users adopt can reflect their interests, belief, or thematic inclinations. Literature has proposed the implications and significance of profile attribute change for a random population of users. However, the use of profile attribute for endorsements and to start a movement have been under-explored. In this work, we consider #LokSabhaElections2019 as a movement and perform a large-scale study of the profile of users who actively made changes to profile attributes centered around #LokSabhaElections2019. We collect the profile metadata for 49.4M users for a period of 2 months from April 5, 2019 to June 5, 2019 amid #LokSabhaElections2019. We investigate how the profile changes vary for the influential leaders and their followers over the social movement. We further differentiate the organic and inorganic ways to show the political inclination from the prism of profile changes. We report how the addition of election campaign related keywords lead to spread of behavior contagion and further investigate it with respect to "Chowkidar Movement" in detail.

Introduction: User profiles on social media platforms serve as a virtual introduction of the users. People often maintain their online profile space to reflect their likes and values. Further, how users maintain their profile helps them develop relationship with coveted audience BIBREF0. A user profile on Twitter is composed of several attributes with some of the most prominent ones being the profile name, screen name, profile image, location, description, followers count, and friend count. While the screen name, display name, profile image, and description identify the user, the follower and friend counts represent the user's social connectivity. Profile changes might represent identity choice at a small level. However, previous studies have shown that on a broader level, profile changes may be an indication of a rise in a social movement BIBREF1, BIBREF2. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study of the profile change behavior of users on Twitter during the 2019 general elections in India. These elections are of interest from the perspective of social media analysis for many reasons. Firstly, the general elections in India were held in 7 phases from 11th April, 2019 to 19th May, 2019. Thus, the elections serve as a rich source of data for social movements and changing political alignments throughout the two months. Secondly, the increase in the Internet user-base and wider adoption of smartphones has made social media outreach an essential part of the broader election campaign. Thus, there exists a considerable volume of political discourse data that can be mined to gain interesting insights. Twitter was widely used for political discourse even during the 2014 general elections BIBREF3 and the number was bound to increase this year. A piece of evidence in favor of this argument is the enormous 49 million followers that Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India has on Twitter. We believe profile attributes have significant potential to understand how social media played a vital role in the election campaign by political parties as well as the supporters during the #LokSabhaElections2019. A prominent example of the use of profile changes for political campaigning is the #MainBhiChowkidar campaign launched by the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) during the #LokSabhaElections2019. In Figure FIGREF2, we show the first occurrence of #MainBhiChowkidar campaign on Twitter which was launched in response to an opposition campaign called “Chowkidar chor hai” (The watchman is a thief). On 17th March 2019, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped up this campaign and added Chowkidar (Watchman) to his display name. This spurred off a social movement on Twitter with users from across the nation and political spectrum updating their profiles on Twitter by prefixing “Chowkidar” to their display name BIBREF4. We are thus interested in studying the different facets of this campaign, in particular, the name changes in the display name of accounts, verified, and others. In Figure FIGREF3, we compare the Twitter profiles of the two leaders of national parties during Lok Sabha Election, 2019. The top profile belongs to @narendramodi (Narendra Modi), PM of India and member of the ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while the bottom profile belongs to @RahulGandhi (Rahul Gandhi), president of Indian National Congress (INC). Figure FIGREF3 shows a snapshot of both leaders before, during, and after the Lok Sabha Elections in 2019. The ruling leader showed brevity in the use of his profile information for political campaigning and changed his profile information during and after the elections, which was not the case with opposition. Intending to understand the political discourse from the lens of profile attributes on social media, we address the following questions.

Question: How do profile changes vary for influential leads and their followers over the social movement?
Answer: Influential leaders are more likely to change their profile attributes than their followers; the leaders do not change their usernames, while their followers change their usernames a lot; the leaders  tend to make new changes related to previous attribute values, while the followers make comparatively less related changes to previous attribute values.