On March 26, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave an address on a visit to Dhaka on the occasion of the National Day ceremony in Bangladesh. During the address, he claimed that he had taken part in a satyagraha movement to support Bangladesh's struggle for freedom, and was also arrested for his involvement.
His statement created a lot of noise on social media, with many questioning the authenticity of his claims. Soon a hashtag #LieLikeModi started trending on Twitter.
Origin Of the Hashtag
The hashtag is by no means new - the first time it was tweeted out was exactly 8 years - on March 25, 2013 by the handle @True_Indian47.
Before Modi's Dhaka address, this hashtag was tweeted 160 times, on and off over the years.
On March 26, shortly after his address, this hashtag was tweeted out 6601 times in a short span of 5 hours. The first tweet was made by handle @PrakashJay77 at 5.58 PM.
A majority of the tweets were made between 7 and 9 PM - which marks the prime time hours for television news as well. Furthermore, 204 tweets were made by verified accounts, which included Congress workers.
Copy-Paste Jobs
By analysing the tweets, we found that the trend was part of a highly organised social media campaign. There were large number of similarly worded tweets posted in a short span of time.
Some of the popular keyword variations we detected were:
1. Modiji was secretly part of the team led by Neil Armstrong that landed on the moon in 1969.
2. Modiji was 19 years old and finished this NASA mission before getting arrested during the Bangladesh Independence Movement.
3. It was Modiji who welcomed Vasco Da Gama at 'Smart City' Calicut.
4. One like = 10 slaps One RT = 100 slaps. Show your power.💪
5. Modiji voted in India's First Ever General Elections in 1951. He was 1 year old. His vote was crucial in getting Jawaharlal Nehru elected as PM.
6. File pic of Modiji meeting his idol in 1942 to discuss about Concentration camps.
7. I fully support Modi's statement of Satyagraha for 'Bhaang-La-Desh'.
8. Rare photo of Modi-ji writing his final paper of his ""MA in Entire Political Science"" course.
With additional inputs from Sujith A