#MainBhiChowkidar

PM Narendra Modi today launched the #MainBhiChowkidar campaign on Twitter with a tweet. It quickly went viral, gaining over 80K likes in few hours, and the Twitter trending page suggests that around half a million tweets have been posted so far containing the #MainBhiChowkidar hashtag.

There’s something really interesting behind this hashtag.

If you publish a tweet containing the MainBhiChowkidar hashtag, you are very likely to receive a personalized reply from the official @narendramodi handle thanking you for supporting the “Main Bhi Chowkidaar” movement. 

Here’re some responses received by the tweeters:

The #MainBhiChowkidar Twitter Bot

It is obvious that Mr. Modi is not manually writing these “thank you” tweets but the job is handled by a Twitter bot. 

This bot is doing some smart things under the hood. Here’s why:

1. The tweets are worded differently.
2. The images of Mr. Modi embedded in the tweets are different per response.
3. The images contain a personalized message — it includes the first name of the person who wrote the tweet.

Writing a Twitter bot is easy but the #MainBhiChowkidar bot is more than just a normal auto-reply bot. It reads the tweets with the #hashtag, fetches the first name of the tweeter, generates a dynamic JPEG image with that name and then sends a personalized reply with that image.

The other interesting thing is that these auto-reply tweets cannot be found through Twitter search.

For instance, a search for “from:narendramodi #MainBhiChowkidar” shows exactly 1 tweet and none of the response tweets. Also, if you go to the replies timeline of @narendramodi, these reply tweets aren’t listed there though they have originated from that very account. 

The source of the tweets reveal that the #MainBhiChowkidar bot is internally called “messages 2019” and it has been built by @OpalinaTech, a Noida-based software services company.