The text and images of the gopdebate: what the public is "talking" about on instagram

The richness of Instagram data makes it possible to tell a compelling story about the public’s “talk” on Instagram. Our work focuses on the use of Instagram by citizens to express their thoughts on the 2016 GOP presidential election. We collected Instagram posts with the hashtags #GOPDebate and #GOPDebates for five months. Using topic-modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze both textual (post captions) and visual (images) attributes we are able to illustrate the topical network of political discussions and actors whom the public talks about on each topic. Our work contributes to literature on the role of social media, and specifically Instagram, in the political domain. The methodology also demonstrates how textual and visual attributes can be used together to categorize photo content

The Digital Battleground: The Political Pulpit to Political Profile

Social media has infiltrated our daily lives, and with an upcoming election, the messages disseminated are becoming increasingly important for the public electorate. By examining Twitter accounts of 2016 Republican presidential candidates through a content analysis, I was able to decipher patterns, preferences and post effectiveness. As my Senior Inquiry research continues, I will be able to use my model to decipher the best practices for political use of Twitter for future elections and political candidates

WHAT IS A ROLE OF TWITTER IN THAI POLITICAL COMMUNICATION?

As internet and smartphones have become more accessible in Thailand, a growth of social networking service (SNS) has been continuously increased. Twitter has ranked as one of the top SNS among other services for several years. With unique feathers of Twitter, it is worthy to investigate how Twitter is used by Thai users. Since politics in Thailand has always been one of the most discussed topic due to its instability, Thai politics was focused in this study. Here, the author aimed to determine a role of Twitter in Thai political communication. Furthermore, factors that influenced the role of Twitter were listed. Four data sets of tweets were collected during the time political incidents occurred. Three analyses were conducted, i.e., format of communication, distribution of user activity and content analysis. Results from the analyses showed that Twitter acted as an information disseminating tool. Most information was informative and it was spread widely among the users. Scale of event, reoccurrence of event and censorship were found to be the factors that affected the role of Twitter. The first two factors influenced size of data set and sentiments in tweets. The last factor affected sources of information and was likely to decrease the size of data set

A Descriptive Analysis of Twitter Followership of the Major Political Parties in Nigeria

The role of twitter as one of the most popular social media application for organisations and political parties has been recognized by various scholars. Twitter has been used by parties as a means of sharing information and manifestoes, and also interacting with their followers online. The study was about how the Twitter followership of major political parties in Nigeria has changed since the 2015 elections. The major political parties for this study were the All Progressive Congress, APC and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. An internet research was carried out using the Twitter platforms for the APC and PDP. The research showed that for APC, their growth from 2014 to 2015 was “fairly significant” from 49 followers in 2014 to 244 followers in 2015, while the PDP recorded a “very significant” growth  from 5839 in 2014 to 79,516 in 2015. Even though the result showed that the APC recorded a growth on Twitter, they are significantly lagging behind on the follower count as their aggregate Twitter followers are less than the number of voters that make up a polling unit in Nigeria.  The surprising fact here is that APC defeated the PDP in the Nigerian presidential election of 2015 by over 3 million votes, yet is trailing the PDP on Twitter, we then have to ask if Nigerian voters have apathy for Twitter? It is recommended that further studies be carried out to ascertain what motivates political parties in Nigeria to use Twitter if as this research has shown there is no correlation between Twitter use and earned votes. Keywords: Twitter, Social Media, Political Parties, APC, PDP, Nigeria

Comunicación pública y participación ciudadana. El uso de Twitter en los ayuntamientos de Cataluña

El desarrollo de los recursos de la Web 2.0 ofrece a las administraciones públicas la posibilidad de difundir información sobre su gestión y de favorecer la participación ciudadana. Las redes sociales, por su gran penetración, pueden ser instrumentos eficaces para mejorar la comunicación entre responsables políticos y ciudadanía, pero es necesario buscar la calidad de las comunicaciones. En este artículo, analizamos el uso que hacen de Twitter una selección de ayuntamientos de Cataluña. Los resultados muestran que no se aprovechan las potencialidades de esta red social.The growth of Web 2.0 resources provides public administrations with the possibility to share information about their governance and it helps to promote citizen participation. Due to theirimportance, social networks may be effective tools for improving communication between elected political leaders and citizens, but there is need to find the quality of communications. In this article, we analyse the use made of Twitter by a sample of City Councils in Catalonia. The results show that the potentials of this social network are not fully use

User engagement and uncertainty from COVID-19 misinformation on social media: an examination of emotions and harms

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were often exposed to harmful social media misinformation. Prior studies have devoted their efforts to detecting misinformation and understanding the psychological features related to misinformation. This paper contributes to the literature of handling crisis misinformation by connecting psychological characteristics to people’s actual actions. Anchoring on social media user engagement reflected in the numbers of retweets, we examine the effects of expressed uncertainty and emotions as well as various platform-specific aspects (hashtags and URLs) by extracting features from captured conversations on Twitter social media platform. Subsequently, we quantify expected harms from the chosen COVID-19 misinformation scenarios from the judgements of several healthcare experts, which were then utilized to classify scenarios into different categories for further analyses. With much of the hypotheses supported in both main effects and interaction effects, the study has theoretical contributions in establishing a mechanism to measure expressed uncertainty and emotions from captured Twitter conversations, measuring misinformation harms from professional experts and examining causal relationships between social media behaviour and uncertainty, emotions, harms and several platform specific features. It also has practical contributions of deriving insights to help involved stakeholders in crisis communications understand the role of misinformation harms, and to reduce misinformation diffusion and minimize possible harms

#Globalcitizen : An explorative Twitter analysis of global identity and sustainability communication

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552(1) Background: global citizenship is often associated with pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Much of this research relies on questionnaire studies, whereas studies drawing on naturally occurring daily communications are under-used. In this paper, we analyse the content that users publish on Twitter related to the issue of global identity and citizenship. (2) Methods: we assessed word frequencies and associated hashtags of 35,237 tweets marked with the hashtag #globalcitizen. A sentiment analysis was conducted to investigate the moods and emotions of the tweets. (3) Results: in line with expectations derived from social identity theory, we found that associated words and hashtags were more often linked to themes of common good/disadvantaged groups than they were to the topic of nature and environment. Providing evidence for an empowerment function of global citizenship, the sentiment analysis suggests that global citizenship is related to rather positive emotions. (4) Conclusion: these findings reveal how identity constructions in social media predict associated contents and possibly pathways to social change

Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version includes corrected typo

The Role of Social Media during Social Movements – Observations from the #metoo Debate on Twitter

In recent years, the development of information communication technologies (ICT) such as social media changed the way people communicate and engage in social movements. While conventional movements were fought in the streets, social media enabled movements to take place online. In this paper, we aim to investigate the role of social media during social movements which evolve online. Specifically, we examined Twitter communication during the #metoo debate. To this end, we applied methods from social network analysis to identify influential users participating during the debate. Conducting a manual content analysis, we classified 200 power users into roles. Likewise, a manual classification of 1,271 tweets found distinct communication categories. The results overall point to different motives: First, the communication was deeply concerned with the issue of sexual harassment, calling for attention and action. Second, we found reason to believe that self-serving and branding intentions drove participation

The Role of Sentiment in Information Propagation on Twitter – An Empirical Analysis of Affective Dimensions in Political Tweets

Twitter is, among other social-media platforms, a service, which is said to have an impact on the public discourse and communication in the society. With the unique feature of “retweeting,” Twitter is an ideal platform for users to spread information. Besides their content and intended use, Twitter messages (“tweets”) often convey pertinent information about their author’s sentiment. In this paper, we examine whether sentiment occurring in politically relevant tweets has an effect on their retweetability (i.e., how often these tweets will be retweeted). Based on a data set of approximately 65,000 tweets, we find a positive relationship between the quantity of words indicating affective dimensions including positive and negative emotions associated with certain political parties or politicians in tweets and their retweet rate. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results