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

Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Traditionally, election campaigns are covered in the mass media with a strong focus on a limited number of top candidates. The question of this paper is whether this knowledge still holds today, when social media outlets are becoming more popular. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on Twitter? This study addresses these question by paring Twitter data with traditional media data for the 2014 Belgian elections. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed strongly related and that candidates with a prominent position in the media are generally also most successful on Twitter. This is not because more popularity on Twitter translates directly into more traditional media coverage, but mainly because largely the same political elite dominates both platforms

The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election

The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 US election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the studyies theoretical claim that a platform's network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media

"It's All Political": The Role of Political Identity in the Identification and Selection of Politically Relevant Entertainment Media

Thanks to technological advances over the past two decades, media consumers now have an unprecedented number of content options. Along with an increase in news options has come an even greater expansion in the number of entertainment options available to media consumers. This is especially true when it comes to fictional entertainment television programming available via cable and services such as Netflix and Hulu. Much attention has been paid to how individuals’ political identities affect their selection of news. Although there is evidence that exposure to entertainment media is fractured along political lines, there remains an assumption that most viewers select entertainment media without any political considerations. The average individual consumes much more entertainment media than they consume news media. What if people’s political identities actually do influence what fictional entertainment media they choose? I contend that 1) individual-level differences such as political identity strength affect whether people evaluate media content as politically relevant, and 2) these evaluations affect whether people selectively expose themselves to fictional entertainment media. Rather than rely on researchers’ designations of media as politically relevant or not, I call for a viewer-centric approach to identifying politically relevant media. Any given media text may be of greater or lesser political relevance to any given media consumer. Unfortunately, asking viewers to identify what television shows are politically relevant isn’t a straightforward process due to the way people often use terms such as “political” and “politics.” To overcome limitations with existing approaches, this dissertation develops a new scale that I use to evaluate individuals’ perceptions of media as politically relevant. I propose a model predicting how the strength of a viewer’s political identities, together with a television show’s content, will affect the viewer’s evaluation of the show as politically relevant. In turn, the evaluation of the show as politically relevant will affect politically motivated selective exposure to that show. In Chapter 2, I develop the Politically Relevant Media (PRM) scale across two studies. In Chapter 3, I examine how attributes of media content and political identities affect evaluations of television programs as politically relevant, as indicated by PRM scale scores. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the predictive and mediating abilities of the PRM scale. I find that political identity strength has a positive effect on evaluations of television programming as politically relevant, and such evaluations are associated with greater politically motivated selective exposure to fictional entertainment shows. This has implications for the study of politically motivated selective exposure more broadly, but particularly in the context of fictional entertainment media.PHDCommunicationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163233/1/smcoles_1.pd

Gender, Language and Politics: the Representation of Theresa May on Twitter

The relationship between women leaders’ language, social media, and politics has been interesting to be discussed.  However, there are lacks previous studies that examined the women leaders’ language and how the word choices represent women leaders on Twitter.Thus, this study aims to find out Theresa May’s language on Twitter and how those word choices represent herself as a woman leader. The data are taken from the tweets on Theresa May’s Twitter account over the last six months of her leadership reign (from January until July 2019), which focused on her crucial tweets about politics and leadership. The researchers adopted four theories to capture and analyze the data from different angles to produce the rich analysis of Theresa May’s word choices and representation on Twitter. The study revealed several word choices used by Theresa May into four categories: (1) announcement tweets, (2) attack/negative tweets, (3) personal characteristics, and (4) policy. Furthermore, the study also found that Theresa May utilized those word choices to represent herself as a political leader. She also used metaphors and pronouns to shape the desired representation. Furthermore, not all PDA elements by Fairclough Fairclough (2012) were employed due to the limited characters number on Twitter or other possible purpose(s). This study is beneficial to enrich the knowledge on how the use of language by woman leader is implicated within social and political contexts of a country. The Linguistics analysis on gender, language, and politics is another take away from this research

Refugees Welcome? Online Hate Speech and Sentiments in Twitter in Spain during the Reception of the Boat Aquarius

High-profile events can trigger expressions of hate speech online, which in turn modifies attitudes and offline behavior towards stigmatized groups. This paper addresses the first path of this process using manual and computational methods to analyze the stream of Twitter messages in Spanish around the boat Aquarius (n = 24,254) before and after the announcement of the Spanish government to welcome the boat in June 2018, a milestone for asylum seekers acceptance in the EU and an event that was highly covered by media. It was observed that most of the messages were related to a few topics and had a generally positive sentiment, although a significant part of messages expressed rejection or hate—often supported by stereotypes and lies—towards refugees and migrants and towards politicians. These expressions grew after the announcement of hosting the boat, although the general sentiment of the messages became more positive. We discuss the theoretical, practical, and methodological implications of the study, and acknowledge limitations referred to the examined timeframe and to the preliminary condition of the conclusions

Public Fora Purpose: Analyzing Viewpoint Discrimination on the President’s Twitter Account

Today, protectable speech takes many forms in many spaces. This Note is about the spaces. This Note discusses whether President Donald J. Trump’s personal Twitter account functions as a public forum, and if so, whether blocking constituents from said account amounts to viewpoint discrimination—a First Amendment freedom of speech violation. Part I introduces the core legal devices and doctrines that have developed in freedom of speech jurisprudence relating to issues of public fora. Part II analyzes whether social media generally serves as public fora, whether the President’s personal Twitter account is a public forum, and whether his recent habit of blocking constituents from that account amounts to viewpoint discrimination. In doing so, Part II also addresses the applicability of the recent decision from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Davison v. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors—wherein a local county government official was held to have engaged in viewpoint discrimination for banning a constituent from her personal social media account—to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University’s pending case against the President for the same. Part III then suggests multiple approaches for courts to analyze these claims, while taking account of an analytical mismatch that occurs when trying to apply the Davison case to the case brought against the President

What factors influence whether politicians’ tweets are retweeted? Using CHAID to build an explanatory model of the retweeting of politicians’ tweets during the 2015 UK General Election campaign

Twitter is ever-present in British political life and many politicians use it as part of their campaign strategies. However, little is known about whether their tweets engage people, for example by being retweeted. This research addresses that gap, examining tweets sent by MPs during the 2015 UK General Election campaign to identify which were retweeted and why. A conceptual model proposes three factors which are most likely to influence retweets: the characteristics of (1) the tweet’s sender, (2) the tweet and (3) its recipients. This research focuses on the first two of these. Content and sentiment analysis are used to develop a typology of the politicians’ tweets, followed by CHAID analysis to identify the factors that best predict which tweets are retweeted. The research shows that the characteristics of tweet and its sender do influence whether the tweet is retweeted. Of the sender’s characteristics, number of followers is the most important – more followers leads to more retweets. Of the tweet characteristics, the tweet’s sentiment is the most influential. Negative tweets are retweeted more than positive or neutral tweets. Tweets attacking opponents or using fear appeals are also highly likely to be retweeted. The research makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating how CHAID models can be used to accurately predict retweets. This method has not been used to predict retweets before and has broad application to other contexts. The research also contributes to our understanding of how politicians and the public interact on Twitter, an area little studied to date, and proposes some practical recommendations regarding how MPs can improve the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigning. The finding that negative tweets are more likely to be retweeted also contributes to the ongoing debate regarding whether people are more likely to pass on positive or negative information online