Tweets by Indian politician Shashi Tharoor and his wife Sunanda Pushkar have been under massive scrutiny in recent days. Pushkar was found dead Friday in a five-star hotel in New Delhi, capping off a bizarre week of allegations, many through social media, that her husband was cheating on her with a Pakistani journalist (and then came subsequent retractions). Quartz examined 86 days of their tweets, the most available through the Twitter $TWTR API and not including those that have since been deleted. Still, several interesting patterns emerge:
With a much larger following, Shashi Tharoor tweeted significantly less than Sunanda Pushkar. Since October, he has averaged 15.9 tweets per day.
Meanwhile, Pushkar tweeted 38.6 times per day on average.
Their mentions of each other on Twitter reflect this as well. In the last 84 days (the oldest available data), Sunanda Pushkar mentioned her husband 443 times in tweets that weren’t retweets—only sometimes by using his Twitter username.
Conversely, Shashi Tharoor mentioned her in 33 non-retweets—including his a tweet on Jan. 16 sending followers to his Facebook $META page, where they announced the couple were “distressed by … unauthorised tweets” and remain “happily married.” (Those tweets were not included in this analysis since they have been deleted.)
Per tweet, Pushkar still was more likely to tweet about Tharoor—on days where she mentioned him, 17.1% of her tweets were about him. On days here that Tharoor mentioned his wife, in comparison, 14.2% of his tweets were about her. Overall, in the same time period, 2.5% of his tweets were about her and 13.7% of hers were about him.
