The Usage of twitter from the spanish media during the elections

Los medios de comunicación tradic ionales han adoptado Twitter c omo otro canal por el que difundir su información y llegar hasta las audiencias digit ales. Este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar las características de los tuits publicados por los me dios españoles durante doce meses en los que se producen dos procesos electorales, para comprobar las di ferencias en la utilización de esta plataforma según el contenido de la cobertura y la fase en que se publica. La investigación se fundamenta en una metodología cua ntitativa, en la que se implem enta un análisis de contenido computarizado de las publicacione s en Twitter que hacen los dis tintos tipos de medios entre 2015 y 2016. Los resultados revelan un us o promocional de herramientas como el hashtag o las menciones en los medios con menos seguidores. Asimismo, la información polít ica se caracteriza por contener un mayor número de menciones y declaraciones de candidatos, especi almente durante la campaña electoral, favoreciendo la aparición de cámaras de eco en la es fera política en Twitter. Traditional media sources have adopted Twitter as a canal to broadcast information across digital audiences. This study has the objective of analyzing the characteristics of the tweets published by Spanish media sources during the twelve months in which presidential electoral processes took place. This was done to test the differences in the use of this platform, according to the content of the coverage, and the phase in which it was published. Our research uses a quantitative methodology, where we used computerized content analysis for Twitter publications that different media made during 2015 and 2016. Our results revealed a promotional use of tools such as the hashtag, or mentions in media with less followers. At the same time, political information was characterized by containing a higher use of mentions and statements by the candidates, especially during the election campaigning, favoring the creation of echo chambers in the political Twittersphere

Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are vulnerable to unobserved variable bias. Hence empirical evidence on the effectiveness of political social media activity is thin. We address this deficit by analysing a novel panel dataset of political Twitter activity in the 2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find that Twitter based campaigning does seem to help win votes, a finding which is consistent across a variety of different model specifications including a first difference regression. The impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, though comparable with that of campaign spending. Our data also support the idea that effects are mediated through other communication channels, hence challenging the relevance of engaging in an interactive fashion

Using Twitter in Political Campaigns: The case of the PRI Candidate in Mexico

Social media has invaded elections in Mexico. However, the power of citizens through the use of this platform is still unknown. Many citizens criticize political candidates using Twitter, others build networks and some others try to collaborate with candidates. This research is focused in understanding this kind of behavior, analyzing the case of the presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) in Mexico who won the presidency with a large participation but without the support of Twitter users. After two online protests against this presidential candidate - #IamnotProletariat and #Iam132 – political image could have been undermined and voters could have thought differently. But this was not the case and despite of this, the candidate won. The challenge to understand this online protest and its link to the political campaign is addressed in this paper

Movilizando terceras opciones en España: La comunicación política de los partidos minoritarios en Twitter

In a context in which traditional parties are losing popular support, minor parties stand as relevant components of contemporary democracies. Such relevance implies that research should approach their communication strategies as an object of study in itself. Ignored by mainstream media, minor parties need to take advantage of the Internet and social media to compete with major parties. This paper analyzes Spanish minor parties’ social-media communication in the context of the April 2019 election. A sample of 1,498 tweets was content-analyzed, gathered from the official Twitter profiles of the by then four main national minor parties: PACMA, the Communist Party of the Spanish Peoples, Zero Cuts, and VOX. Results indicate a lack of party-citizen interaction and dialogue, as well as the fact that mobilization tweets focus on traditional campaign-boosting functions.Es un escenario donde los partidos tradicionales pierden apoyo popular, los partidos minoritarios se erigen como sujetos relevantes en las democracias contemporáneas. Esta relevancia implica que desde la investigación académica la comunicación de los partidos minoritarios deba estudiarse en sus propios términos. Ignorados por los medios de comunicación tradicionales, los partidos minoritarios necesitan aprovechar las ventajas que suponen la web y las RRSS para competir con los grandes partidos. Este trabajo analiza la comunicación en redes sociales de los partidos minoritarios españoles en las elecciones generales de abril de 2019, con una muestra de 1.498 tuits recogidos de los perfiles oficiales de Twitter de los (por entonces) cuatro principales partidos minoritarios: PACMA, el Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España, Recortes Cero y VOX. Los resultados indican falta de interacción y diálogo partidos-ciudadanos, con tuits de movilización centrados en las funciones tradicionales de impulso de la campaña

Reaching, engaging and bonding with voters on social media: the case of 2014/2015 Croatian presidential elections

This paper examines the ways in which presidential candidates use social media in their election campaigns to democratise politics and political representation. The study is based on content analysis of statements which candidates in 2014/2015 Croatian presidential elections published on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts. The results show that candidates did not use social media to reach, engage and form stronger bonds with potential voters. By failing to do so, they have missed the opportunity to bring disenchanted voters back into the political arena and potentially increase the legitimacy of the democratic processes

Validation of Twitter opinion trends with national polling aggregates: Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump

Measuring and forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is a long-standing goal of big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can capture the opinion of the general population. Here we develop a method to infer the opinion of Twitter users regarding the candidates of the 2016 US Presidential Election by using a combination of statistical physics of complex networks and machine learning based on hashtags co-occurrence to develop an in-domain training set approaching 1 million tweets. We investigate the social networks formed by the interactions among millions of Twitter users and infer the support of each user to the presidential candidates. The resulting Twitter trends follow the New York Times National Polling Average, which represents an aggregate of hundreds of independent traditional polls, with remarkable accuracy. Moreover, the Twitter opinion trend precedes the aggregated NYT polls by 10 days, showing that Twitter can be an early signal of global opinion trends. Our analytics unleash the power of Twitter to uncover social trends from elections, brands to political movements, and at a fraction of the cost of national polls

Reaching, engaging and bonding with voters on social media: the case of 2014/2015 Croatian presidential elections

This paper examines the ways in which presidential candidates use social media in their election campaigns to democratise politics and political representation. The study is based on content analysis of statements which candidates in 2014/2015 Croatian presidential elections published on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts. The results show that candidates did not use social media to reach, engage and form stronger bonds with potential voters. By failing to do so, they have missed the opportunity to bring disenchanted voters back into the political arena and potentially increase the legitimacy of the democratic processes

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

TikTok, already widely used before the pandemic, boomed during the quarantine that locked down large parts of the world, reaching 2 billion downloads and 800 million monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2020. Of these 800 million users, 41% are aged between 16 and 24 years. This social network, widely known for its entertainment videos, is increasingly becoming a place for political discussion and therefore a unique opportunity for political actors to (re)connect with young people. Acknowledging that the political uses of TikTok are still understudied, this paper aims to explore whether and how Spanish political parties are including TikTok as part of their communication strategy. Through an affordance-centered content analysis of all the posts published by the five most important Spanish political parties (PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, Podemos, and Vox), the current results show that, although all Spanish political parties have adopted this platform, their usage is unequal. From a quantitative perspective, PP was the first party to open a TikTok account, but its usage has been discontinuous; Podemos and Ciudadanos are the parties that publish the most and most constantly, while Vox has only published nine posts and the PSOE one. Nonetheless, from a qualitative perspective, Podemos and Vox generate more engagement and seem to understand and exploit TikTok's specific affordances better. The findings allow it to be concluded that, although globally Spanish political parties do not fully exploit the platform's affordances and tend to use it as a unilateral tool for promotion, the most engaging posts are those favoring interaction and geared toward politainment

The Anointed Son, The Hired Gun, and the Chai Wala: Enemies and Insults in Politicians’ Tweets in the Run-Up to the 2019 Indian General Elections

This study seeks to assess the prevalence, style, and impact of antagonistic messaging on Twitter in the two years preceding the 2019 Indian General Elections. Focusing on the leadership of the two key parties – the ruling BJP, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, and the opposition INC’s president Rahul Gandhi, we attempt to understand how the politicians sought to portray each other on Twitter, and how their followers reacted to these characterizations, through the lens of Murray Edelman’s work on the ‘Political Enemy’. By thematically coding tweets and quantitatively analyzing their retweets, we find that negative tweets by and large are significantly more popular for all three politicians, and that the opposition leader allocated a significantly larger proportion of his tweets to attacks. We conclude that while leaders in power and those in opposition may take different stances with messaging, Twitter as a social networking site can perpetuate the online reward for attacking behavior