Talking with and about Politicians on Twitter: An Analysis of Tweets Containing @-mentions of Candidates in the Brazilian Presidential Elections

While Twitter has become an increasingly important platform for public opinion formation, little is known about its use in recent Latin American election campaigns. We therefore investigate the case of the presidential elections in Brazil in October 2014, in order to analyze communication structures in actual and para-social interactions with presidential candidates. In particular, while Twitter makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their opinion online, it is maybe even more important that they can also address and communicate with persons who would otherwise not be reachable at all. Politicians are probably the most important group in this regard. Based on N = 1,891,657 tweets containing an @mention of a candidate in the Brazilian elections of 2014, we investigate which actual or para-social interactions with the candidates take place. Furthermore, because framing literature suggests that all actors involved in a discussion on social media will try to highlight specific aspects and interpretations of issues and events, we used techniques of co-word analysis to investigate the ways in which the main candidates were framed by the Twitter users. The results give insight into the deliberative potential of Twitter: they show how the candidates are presented to the social media community and thus how this presentation may be reflected in public opinion.While Twitter has become an increasingly important platform for public opinion formation, little is known about its use in recent Latin American election campaigns. We therefore investigate the case of the presidential elections in Brazil in October 2014, in order to analyze communication structures in actual and para-social interactions with presidential candidates. In particular, while Twitter makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their opinion online, it is maybe even more important that they can also address and communicate with persons who would otherwise not be reachable at all. Politicians are probably the most important group in this regard. Based on N = 1,891,657 tweets containing an @mention of a candidate in the Brazilian elections of 2014, we investigate which actual or para-social interactions with the candidates take place. Furthermore, because framing literature suggests that all actors involved in a discussion on social media will try to highlight specific aspects and interpretations of issues and events, we used techniques of co-word analysis to investigate the ways in which the main candidates were framed by the Twitter users. The results give insight into the deliberative potential of Twitter: they show how the candidates are presented to the social media community and thus how this presentation may be reflected in public opinion

Visualising the intellectual and social structures of digital humanities using an invisible college model

This thesis explores the intellectual and social structures of an emerging field, Digital Humanities (DH). After around 70 years of development, DH claims to differentiate itself from the traditional Humanities for its inclusiveness, diversity, and collaboration. However, the ‘big tent’ concept not only limits our understandings of its research structure, but also results in a lack of empirical review and sustainable support. Under this umbrella, whether there are merely fragmented topics, or a consolidated knowledge system is still unknown. This study seeks to answer three research questions: a) Subject: What research topics is the DH subject composed of? b) Scholar: Who has contributed to the development of DH? c) Environment: How diverse are the backgrounds of DH scholars? The Invisible College research model is refined and applied as the methodological framework that produces four visualised networks. As the results show, DH currently contributes more towards the general historical literacy and information science, while longitudinally, it was heavily involved in computational linguistics. Humanistic topics are more popular and central, while technical topics are relatively peripheral and have stronger connections with non-Anglophone communities. DH social networks are at the early stages of development, and the formation is heavily influenced by non-academic and non-intellectual factors, e.g., language, working country, and informal relationships. Although male scholars have dominated the field, female scholars have encouraged more communication and built more collaborations. Despite the growing appeals for more diversity, the level of international collaboration in DH is more extensive than in many other disciplines. These findings can help us gain new understandings on the central and critical questions about DH. To the best of the candidate’s knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the formal and informal structures in DH with a well-grounded research model

Methods and applications in social networks analysis

The Social Network Analysis perspective has proven the ability to develop a significant breadth of theoretical and methodological issues witnessed by the contribution of an increasing number of scholars and the multiplication of empirical applications in a wide range of scientific fields. One of the disciplinary areas in which this development has occurred, among others, is certainly that of computational social science, by virtue of the developing field of online social networks and the leading role of information technologies in the production of scientific knowledge. The complex nature of social phenomena enforced the usefulness of the network perspective as a wealth of theoretical and methodological tools capable of penetrating within the dimensions of that complexity. The book hosts eleven contributions that within a sound theoretical ground, present different examples of speculative and applicative areas where the Social Network Analysis can contribute to explore, interpret and predict social interaction between actors. Some of the contributions were presented at the ARS’19 Conference held in Vietri sul Mare (Salerno, Italy) in October, 29-31 2019; it was the seventh of a biennial meetings series started in 2007 with the aim to promote relevant results and the most recent methodological developments in Social Network Analysis

Governance and Responsibilities in the Context of Digital Platforms: Three Essays on the Interplay between Platform Governance and the Political Role of the Corporation

This dissertation sheds light on the critical research topic of platform governance defined broadly as the manner in which platform owners incentivize and influence the participation of autonomous users within their respective digital platforms. Platform governance especially as it pertains to the exercise of voice presents important challenges to traditional conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of private corporations. The dissertation comprises of three essays (chapters 2, 3, and 4) that collectively study (i) the political underpinnings of platform governance, (ii) the political roles and responsibilities that platform owners undertake within their respective platforms, and (iii) the intellectual structure that denotes extant research into the political role of the corporation. The first essay (chapter 2) reviews extant research into the political role of the corporation as a precursor for the study of platform governance. Using Web of Science to source a dataset of political articles published in management outlets and bibliometric techniques, I highlight the gaps and opportunities that denote extant research and propose a subsequent research agenda. The second essay (chapter 3) examines the limitations of underpowered conceptions of platform governance and proposes an alternative conception informed by political research within management. The study develops the arguments through invoking multiple literature strands coupled with three mini case studies that are leveraged for illustrative purposes. The third essay (chapter 4) examines the political mediator role of platforms owners through which they govern the engagement between platform communities and their respective political sphere. Using an inductive qualitative study of Twitter, I unpack the political practices and activities that denote platform governance. The practices are further contextualized by several factors that influence their adoption by platform owners. Collectively, the essays contribute to platform governance research through bringing fresh insights into extant understanding of the expansive roles and responsibilities of corporations in the digital age

Governance and Responsibilities in the Context of Digital Platforms: Three Essays on the Interplay between Platform Governance and the Political Role of the Corporation

This dissertation sheds light on the critical research topic of platform governance defined broadly as the manner in which platform owners incentivize and influence the participation of autonomous users within their respective digital platforms. Platform governance – especially as it pertains to the exercise of voice – presents important challenges to traditional conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of private corporations. The dissertation comprises of three essays (chapters 2, 3, and 4) that collectively study (i) the political underpinnings of platform governance, (ii) the political roles and responsibilities that platform owners undertake within their respective platforms, and (iii) the intellectual structure that denotes extant research into the political role of the corporation. The first essay (chapter 2) reviews extant research into the political role of the corporation as a precursor for the study of platform governance. Using Web of Science to source a dataset of political articles published in management outlets and bibliometric techniques, I highlight the gaps and opportunities that denote extant research and propose a subsequent research agenda. The second essay (chapter 3) examines the limitations of underpowered conceptions of platform governance and proposes an alternative conception informed by political research within management. The study develops the arguments through invoking multiple literature strands coupled with three mini case studies that are leveraged for illustrative purposes. The third essay (chapter 4) examines the political mediator role of platforms owners through which they govern the engagement between platform communities and their respective political sphere. Using an inductive qualitative study of Twitter, I unpack the political practices and activities that denote platform governance. The practices are further contextualized by several factors that influence their adoption by platform owners. Collectively, the essays contribute to platform governance research through bringing fresh insights into extant understanding of the expansive roles and responsibilities of corporations in the digital age

All the ties that bind. A socio-semantic network analysis of Twitter political discussions

Social media play a crucial role in what contemporary sociological reflections define as a ‘hybrid media system’. Online spaces created by social media platforms resemble global public squares hosting large-scale social networks populated by citizens, political leaders, parties and organizations, journalists, activists and institutions that establish direct interactions and exchange contents in a disintermediated fashion. In the last decade, an increasing number of studies from researchers coming from different disciplines has approached the study of the manifold facets of citizen participation in online political spaces. In most cases, these studies have focused on the investigation of direct relationships amongst political actors. Conversely, relatively less attention has been paid to the study of contents that circulate during online discussions and how their diffusion contributes to building political identities. Even more rarely, the study of social media contents has been investigated in connection with those concerning social interactions amongst online users. To fill in this gap, my thesis work proposes a methodological procedure consisting in a network-based, data-driven approach to both infer communities of users with a similar communication behavior and to extract the most prominent contents discussed within those communities. More specifically, my work focuses on Twitter, a social media platform that is widely used during political debates. Groups of users with a similar retweeting behavior - hereby referred to as discursive communities - are identified starting with the bipartite network of Twitter verified users retweeted by nonverified users. Once the discursive communities are obtained, the corresponding semantic networks are identified by considering the co-occurrences of the hashtags that are present in the tweets sent by their members. The identification of discursive communities and the study of the related semantic networks represent the starting point for exploring more in detail two specific conversations that took place in the Italian Twittersphere: the former occured during the electoral campaign before the 2018 Italian general elections and in the two weeks after Election day; the latter centered on the issue of migration during the period May-November 2019. Regarding the social analysis, the main result of my work is the identification of a behavior-driven picture of discursive communities induced by the retweeting activity of Twitter users, rather than determined by prior information on their political affiliation. Although these communities do not necessarily match the political orientation of their users, they are closely related to the evolution of the Italian political arena. As for the semantic analysis, this work sheds light on the symbolic dimension of partisan dynamics. Different discursive communities are, in fact, characterized by a peculiar conversational dynamics at both the daily and the monthly time-scale. From a purely methodological aspect, semantic networks have been analyzed by employing three (increasingly restrictive) benchmarks. The k-shell decomposition of both filtered and non-filtered semantic networks reveals the presence of a core-periphery structure providing information on the most debated topics within each discursive community and characterizing the communication strategy of the corresponding political coalition

Social bots versus real humans : the framing of 'Trump's Wall' on Twitter

Around the globe, elites are using social media and computational propaganda to manipulate public opinion, (Bradshaw and Howard, 2018) increasingly degrading the traditional news media's gatekeeping function while building a symbiotic relationship with ideological media that forgo objectivity (Entman and Usher, 2018). Although a number of studies have examined framing of content in social media, including Twitter, no study known to the author has isolated bot-generated tweets to understand if they are capable of framing issues and how they frame them compared to real humans. The current research explores this issue by using a machine-learning (ML) software that detects whether a post came from a social bot account versus a real human with up to 100 percent accuracy for political bots (Yang et al., 2019). After an extensive manual data collection procedure, the current research goes through three steps: 1) identify whether a Twitter post originated from a social bot vs. real human, 2) determine the frame(s) and sentiment used in the post, 3) determine if the results fall in line with an asymmetrical cascading network activation model where the posting of right-leaning content is more automated than left-leaning content (Entman and Usher, 2018). To explore the existence of a new cascading network activation model that is asymmetrical, the content examined had to be polarizing. Thus, the context selected for the study is President Donald Trump's current Mexico border wall campaign. In addition to the data capture method described, a content analysis method is also utilized to make comparisons between frames used by social bots versus real humans and the right versus the left.Includes bibliographical reference