  Influencers are key to the nature and networks of information propagation on
social media. Influencers are particularly important in political discourse
through their engagement with issues, and may derive their legitimacy either
solely or in large part through online operation, or have an offline sphere of
expertise such as entertainers, journalists etc. To quantify influencers'
political engagement and polarity, we use Google's Universal Sentence Encoder
(USE) to encode the tweets of 6k influencers and 26k Indian politicians during
political crises in India. We then obtain aggregate vector representations of
the influencers based on their tweet embeddings, which alongside retweet graphs
help compute their stance and polarity with respect to these political issues.
We find that influencers engage with the topics in a partisan manner, with
polarized influencers being rewarded with increased retweeting and following.
Moreover, we observe that specific groups of influencers are consistently
polarized across all events. We conclude by discussing how our study provides
insights into the political schisms of present-day India, but also offers a
means to study the role of influencers in exacerbating political polarization
in other contexts.
