Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj is the most followed female leader on Twitter with over 11 million followers. Queen Rania of Jordan was the second most followed female leader with over 10 million followers.
These figures were released by the PR firm Burston Marsteller in their 'Twiplomacy 2018' report. Twiplomacy is the short form of Twitter diplomacy.
Overall Sushma Swaraj was at eight spot. She is also the most followed foreign minister in the world.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the third most followed leader in the world after American President Donald Trump and the Pope. The official PMO handle is at fourth spot with over 26 million Twitter followers.
However several Indian politicians including PM Modi, Sushma Swaraj, Congress President Rahul Gandhi, Shashi Tharoor and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal lost followers on Twitter after Twitter's purge of deleting suspicious accounts in a cleanup last week. The Indian Prime Minister lost nearly 300,000 followers in 24 hours on his personal and official twitter handles while Sushma Swaraj lost around 74,000 followers. Shashi Tharoor lost around 150,000 followers while Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal lost around 17,000 and 91,000 followers. This purge resulted in US President Donald Trump losing around 340,000 followers.
External Relations Manager at 'Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations' Utsav Gandhi tells SBS Hindi,
"Burson Marsteller, a very big PR firm, has been studying Twiplomacy for the past many years. They have been studying how leaders around the world use social media for their benefit and for talking to their constituents directly."
"Sushma Swaraj has used Twitter well, especially when it comes to issues like passports and other issues that come under her office", says Mr Gandhi
Mr Gandhi also made a mention of the trolling that the Indian Foreign Minister was subjected to recently,
"This is not a good thing. In any democracy we are going to have differences of opinion and these differences could get magnified on social media sites like Twitter. On one hand, people are getting a platform to voice their opinion but they should be careful and Twitter should also be careful that this platform should not be misused. There is a very fine boundary between free speech and hate speech and Twitter has said that it will use technology like AI machine learning to recognise some words and will remove them from their platform...Twitter should take responsibility that such trolling should not happen on their platform."
