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High net‐worth individuals (HNIs) play important roles in influencing policy through their voices. Technology‐mediated means of addressing issues, such as social media activism, have become a central part of such policy advocacy. We examined the Twitter engagement of the 50 wealthiest individuals and their 'networks' in India and the United States, specifically their engagement with citizens' movements and policy issues related to citizenship and immigration, with a focus on debates triggered by the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), respectively. We quantified the level of engagement of 'HNI networks' with these debates through a textual analysis of their tweets using computational methods combined with manual annotation, followed by qualitative analysis and comparison of subjective meanings attached by actors to key terms. We found that American HNIs leveraged their social media presence to advocate for inclusive immigration and naturalisation policies, their model of advocacy characterised by confrontation, collective action and ownership by key actors, thus exhibiting mimetic isomorphism. Indian HNIs' tweets on CAA were few and far between, with no call for change and no evidence of either collective action or individual ownership, and a hesitation to challenge the central government, thus exhibiting coercive isomorphism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the ubiquitous reach of social media, influencers are becoming increasingly central to the articulation of political agendas on a range of topics. We curate a sample of tweets from the 200 most followed sportspersons in India and the USA since 2019, map their connections with politicians and visualise their engagements with key topics online. We find significant differences between the ways in which Indian and US sportspersons engage with politics—whereas leading Indian sportspersons tend to align closely with the ruling party and engage minimally in dissent, American sportspersons engage with a range of political issues and are willing to publicly criticise politicians or policy. Our findings suggest that the ownership and governmental control of sports affect public stances on issues that professional sportspersons are willing to engage in online. Also, depending on the government of the day, speaking up against the state and the government in power has different socioeconomic costs in the USA and India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]