They used historical trend data from the Twitter Trending Topics Archive.
The report included a case study of a single campaign to trend “#ModiMeinHaiDum” on March 19, 2019: The first tweet was issued at 7.47am; by 9.30am, it was trending across India with 4,800 uses of the hashtag.
We did not fact-check the pre-written tweets but found that more than half of the templates use numbers and statistics to make a claim,” the report states.
The report could not directly verify that the BJP coordinated these campaigns, but noted that “while the WhatsApp groups appeared informal in nature, an organization develops the campaign narratives and maintains the infrastructure in the background”.