From #Sexual Assault to #Political Campaign Issue: Understanding Sexual Assault Narratives on Social Media Platforms During Political Campaigns in India

Abstract In recent years, online election campaigns in India have evolved beyond using only Twitter and Facebook to take advantage of the population’s continuing interest in other social media platforms. Hashtag campaigns are now found on other platforms, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube. With this development, online discourses on political campaigns have matured and become diverse. Several social movement issues in India, such as the anti-corruption movement, anti-caste movement, citizenship movement, and the #MeToo movement, have developed and been sustained on social media platforms in the past eight years. Since 2014, some of these movements have coexisted and intersected with election campaigns in India. This qualitative mixed-method study is an analysis of the influence of sexual assault narratives on online political campaigns in India. This study concerns the intersection of the theoretical frameworks of hashtag activism and locational identity, and it is based on the extensive interviews of eight citizen political volunteers and the thematic analysis of 60,195 Facebook posts during the election campaigns in Bihar and West Bengal elections in 2020 and 2021. The study finds that the political campaigns integrate sexual assault narratives into their online discourses if those narratives promote scandal frames and/or revenge frames. The campaign discourses on social media platforms seldom focus on the policy-related issue of sexual assault.