What are the behavioural patterns of fans of Tamil movie stars on social media?

Tamil cinema fans on Twitter engage in political discourse, showcasing the fusion of cultural loyalty and activism.

In Tamil Nadu, cinema serves a role beyond entertainment — it significantly influences and merges with the political sphere. The digital expressions of Tamil cinema fans on Twitter have illuminated a compelling dialogue between filmic content and political engagement. As movie stars with political aspirations make the leap from acting to political roles, their fan bases hold the potential to transform into potent political entities. The extensive activity of such fans on social media is notable owing to their ability to influence public discourse. The appointment of a hitherto online personality who had a case filed against him by a senior journalist as a spokesperson of the Tamil Vetri Kazhagam party founded by actor Vijay is a case in point. This article delves into the narratives that the fans of popular Tamil movie stars subscribe to on social media.

We use Twitter to study this as it is a representative platform suitable to gauge the effect, albeit it may not give the exact picture of the magnitude. By analysing trending Twitter topics related to Tamil cinema and politics, we explore how fans utilise their devotion to film stars and cinematic stories to participate in and influence politics, showcasing a distinctive fusion of cultural loyalty and political activism.

This research was jointly conducted by the Social Media Networks and (Dis)information Research Group at King’s College London and the Populous Empowerment Network India, a research organisation based in Chennai. We systematically collected the top five Twitter hashtags trending every half-hour within the ‘India’ geography from November 26, 2018, to December 17, 2022. Each day, hashtags were ranked based on their duration of trend, and a descending order list was compiled to determine the top hashtags for further analysis. Out of the total 6,138 hashtags collected, 342 related to Tamil Nadu were specifically identified and further classified into political (115) and non-political (227) themes. This section of the study, encompassing accounts and hashtags, is confined to Tamil Nadu, and all percentages and numbers are to be interpreted within this regional context. Detailed tweet data — including usernames, engagement metrics, timestamps, IDs, and URLs — associated with these hashtags were extracted using the Twitter API for academic purposes.

To better understand the relationship matrix between fan accounts and the political hashtags, we grouped the fan accounts into groups, namely — ‘Anti-Ajith’, ‘Anti-Vijay’, ‘Pro-Suriya’, ‘Pro-Ajith’, ‘Pro-Dhanush’, ‘Pro-Kamal’, ‘Pro-Rajini’, ‘Pro-Simbu’, ‘Pro-Sivakarthikeyan’, ‘Pro-Vijay’, ‘Pro-Vikram’, and others. Likewise, we grouped the political hashtags into ‘Pro-NTK’, ‘Pro-INC’, ‘Pro-DMK’, ‘Pro-BJP’, ‘Anti-NTK’, ‘Anti-INC’, ‘Anti-DMK’, ‘Anti-BJP’, ‘Anti-AIADMK’, ‘Anti-State-Govt’, and ‘Anti-State-Govt-from-May-21’.

Fan accounts were mapped using actor hashtags that they frequently interacted with. These fan accounts were then studied for their interactions with political hashtags. To compare the influence of certain ‘fan bases’ in the Twitter political trends, let us take a look at how the movie fan accounts of different actors share the Twitter space based on their interaction with certain hashtags.

The structure of engagement among fans of different stars, when deductively categorised into dominants (with the most reach), fans (intermediary users with moderate reach), and regulars (those with the least engagement) highlights how some actors, like Rajinikanth, have a broader organic reach directly to fans, compared to others who rely more on intermediaries to amplify their message. This suggests differences in how fan clubs and communities form around each star and engage with political content on Twitter.

Among the political hashtags that trended in the study period, the hashtags that supported the DMK showed the highest number of occurrences. It was close to 24% of the total number of political hashtags. Tamil actor Vijay had the most number of fan accounts during the study period.