Social Media Monitoring of the Campaigns for the 2013 German Bundestag Elections on Facebook and Twitter

As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elections, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parliament [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of January 2009 to October 2013. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls containing approximately 469,000 posts. Twitter data was collected between June and December 2013 finishing with the constitution of the government. On Twitter we identified 1,009 candidates and 76 other agents, for example, journalists. We estimated the number of relevant tweets to exceed eight million for the period from July 27 to September 27 alone. In this document we summarize past research in the literature, discuss possibilities for research with our data set, explain the data collection procedures, and provide a description of the data and a discussion of issues for archiving and dissemination of social media data

Systematically Monitoring Social Media: the case of the German federal election 2017

It is a considerable task to collect digital trace data at a large scale and at the same time adhere to established academic standards. In the context of political communication, important challenges are (1) defining the social media accounts and posts relevant to the campaign (content validity), (2) operationalizing the venues where relevant social media activity takes place (construct validity), (3) capturing all of the relevant social media activity (reliability), and (4) sharing as much data as possible for reuse and replication (objectivity). This project by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the E-Democracy Program of the University of Koblenz-Landau conducted such an effort. We concentrated on the two social media networks of most political relevance, Facebook and Twitter.Comment: PID: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-56149-4, GESIS Papers 2018|

Cheapest Is dearest, though far from professional: A qualitative study on the use of social media during the Federal Election 2021 in Germany

Like in other areas, the importance of social media in the German political communication landscape has rapidly grown in recent years. The purpose of this study is to examine how the communication professionals of the different parties of the German Bundestag describe and characterize the role of social media in their political communication, especially in the last federal election in 2021. This research fills a critical gap by investigating 13 semiopen qualitative interviews with both political and strategic officials of the eight parties represented in the German Bundestag. By doing so, it provides insights into current and future social media practices and their level of professionalization in the German political sphere. Both the sample and focus of this study are, to our knowledge, unique in their nature. The results indicate that, while social media is seen as one of the most important channels to both inform and communicate with potential voters, the professionalization in the field seems to be on a relatively low level. Namely, both strategic and political professionals criticize a lack of human, time, and financial resources. Therefore, the parties lack behind in their practices, particularly considering the newest trends and possibilities of social media like big data, algorithms, or monitoring practices. These results suggest that previous assumptions regarding social media as a cheap and resource-efficient practice are outdated. However, the communicators voice future efforts to catch up on these topics. Further research is needed to investigate how the parties meet these intents

'Show me the money and the party!' - variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently for Facebook and Twitter. While the influence of money is homogenous for Facebook and Twitter with the more resources candidates have, the more likely they are to adopt, the effect is stronger for Facebook. Conversely, a party's impact on adoption is heterogeneous across channels, a pattern we suggest is driven by the different audiences Facebook and Twitter attract. We also find candidates' personality traits only correlate with Twitter adoption, but their impact is minimal. Our findings demonstrate that social media adoption by politicians is far from homogenous, and that there is a need to differentiate social media channels from one another when exploring motivations for their use

Using Social Media in the Bahraini 2014 Elections “A Study on a Sample of Young People”

Social media is considered one of the important instruments professionally employed in the elections in various countries around the world; as social media represents an important space for social communication, cultural exchange, and political debate among young people. The young believe that this default space provides a great deal of information, and perhaps this is the most important reason which leads them to love it. This use of space developed from being a mere tool for entertainment and building friendships to rather include various walks of life. The political issue, however, was not the exception on which the young depended on social media as an important source for their information.The fourth social media report issued by the Government Administration College  in Dubai in 2014  indicated that the percentage of users of the most important social media networks in Bahrain reached as high as (410. 000 ) users of Twitter and  (360. 000 )users of  Facebook in a small country of not more than  one million people.This study attempts to shed light on some facts associated with the Bahraini youth use of social media in the parliamentary and municipal elections which were held on November 25, 2014 in Bahrain. This study also aimed to identify the degree of young people reliance on social media as a source of information about the candidates and their election programs. Keywords: Bahraini youth, Social media, Diffusion of Innovations theory, Elections, public sphere theory

Conversations and Campaign Dynamics in a Hybrid Media Environmen

This article examines how Members of the German Bundestag (MdBs) used Twitter in the context of the country’s 2013 federal elections. In particular, we explore the dynamics in the MdBs’ use of Twitter during different periods of the electoral term: How do the tweeting habits of MdBs differ by party before and during the election campaign in (a) public versus personal communication and (b) campaign versus policy messages? How are the selection of interaction partners, centralization on leading actors, and reciprocity of the MdBs’ Twitter networks affected by election campaigning? We address these questions by conducting a content analysis combined with a network analysis of interaction patterns. The comparative application of both methods explains the differences of MdBs’ networks. The comparison clearly exhibits election campaign-driven changes related to the amount of activity and the character of tweeted messages. During the campaign period, MdBs’ tweets clearly discussed specific policies less than before. Tweeting about one’s personal life occurred also less frequently in the final campaign stage. Instead, the MdBs mainly complement other forms of election campaigning through a vivid metacommunication on campaign developments. Network relations reflect these variations and were less often reciprocated in proximity to the election and showed a higher degree of group homophily. We also found a substantial representation of print and broadcast media actors in the examined @reply networks. It is likely that these interactions and conversations with journalists are part of an MdB’s individual performance of “news management.

Can electoral popularity be predicted using socially generated big data?

Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social collective behaviour in a quantitative framework. In this contribution we discuss one such possibility: the monitoring and predicting of popularity dynamics of candidates and parties through the analysis of socially generated data on the web during electoral campaigns. Such data offer considerable possibility for improving our awareness of popularity dynamics. However they also suffer from significant drawbacks in terms of representativeness and generalisability. In this paper we discuss potential ways around such problems, suggesting the nature of different political systems and contexts might lend differing levels of predictive power to certain types of data source. We offer an initial exploratory test of these ideas, focussing on two data streams, Wikipedia page views and Google search queries. On the basis of this data, we present popularity dynamics from real case examples of recent elections in three different countries.Comment: To appear in Information Technolog

TWITTER AND THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE – A GRAPH ANALYSIS OF GERMAN POLITICIANS

This paper examines the Twitter social graph of German politicians and political parties during a time period not potentially biased by nearby elections. Based on a data set of 1,719 politicians across the entire political spectrum of this important country in the EU, two graphs are constructed, which also reflect relationships within and between parties: the follower graph, consisting of all follower-followee relationships between German politicians, and the “mention graph”, which models direct references of politicians to their colleagues. Our main contributions are as follows: First, we analyse these graphs according to several statistics and graph metrics, characterizing political parties according to their collective participation in Twit-ter. We also investigate the openness for following ideas across political camps, resulting in the dis-covery of three distinct groups of political parties. We also find that membership in political parties itself explains only little of the variation in the formation of ties. There is also evidence that politicians with less activity exhibit a higher degree of openness than users with active engagement in tweets and discussions. This case study on social media adoption in politics leads to interesting insights into po-litical debate in the information society