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

Elite Tweets: Analysing the Twitter Communication Patterns of Labour Party Peers in the House of Lords

The micro-blogging platform Twitter has gained notoriety for its status as both a communication channel between private individuals, and as a public forum monitored by journalists, the public, and the state. Its potential application for political communication has not gone unnoticed; politicians have used Twitter to attract voters, interact with constituencies and advance issue-based campaigns. This article reports on the preliminary results of the research team’s work with 21 peers sitting on the Labour frontbench. It is based on the monitoring and archival of the peers’ activity on Twitter for a period of 100 days from 16th May to 28th September 2012. Using a sample of more than 4,363 tweets and a mixed methodology combining semantic analysis, social network analysis and quantitative analysis, this paper explores the peers’ patterns of usage and communication on Twitter. Key findings are that as a tweeting community their behavior is consistent with others, however there is evidence that a coherent strategy is lacking. Labour peers tend to work in ego networks of self-interest as opposed to working together to promote party polic

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

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

Tweetocracy Switzerland: exploring the representativeness, structuration and content of swiss party politics on twitter

This contribution puts forward an explorative account of the Swiss political parties' presence on Twitter. Social media in general, and the Twitter microblogging service more in particular, have recently received a lot of attention by scholars who try to harvest the new data source for the social sciences. However, the validity of these data sources is heavily disputed. Therefore, this contribution takes one step back and tries to establish the usefulness of political communication on Twitter for the political sciences in Switzerland, a context which is not well studied so far. More precisely, this study serves two main purposes. First, a descriptive overview over the geographical distribution, network structure and basic dynamic trends of Swiss Twitter accounts which are related to one of the political parties in Switzerland is presented. Subsequently, social network and text analyses are applied to provide evidence on the following questions. In terms of its representativeness, it can be shown that the Swiss partisan Twitter sphere is systematically biases towards the political left and urban areas. As for the structuration of the Twitter sphere, it is revealed that users are separated into a handful of highly networked actors and many peripheral ones. Furthermore, there are clear signs of political homophily among users of the same party. In terms of the Tweets communicated, left and small center parties show a more conversational style than right parties

Political Interaction beyond Party Lines:Communication Ties and Party Polarization in Parliamentary Twitter Networks

A growing body of research has examined the uptake of social media by politicians, the formation of communication ties in online political networks, and the interplay between social media and political polarization. However, few studies have analyzed how social media are affecting communication in parliamentary networks. This is especially relevant in highly fragmented political systems in which collaboration between political parties is crucial to win support in parliament. Does MPs’ use of social media foster communications among parliamentarians who think differently, or does it result in like-minded clusters polarized along party lines, confining MPs to those who think alike? This study analyzes the formation of communication ties and the degree of homophily in the Dutch MPs’ @mention Twitter network. We employed exponential random graph models on a 1-year sample of all tweets in which Dutch MPs mentioned each other (N = 7,356) to discover the network parameters (reciprocity, popularity, and brokerage) and individual attributes (seniority, participation in the parliamentary commissions, age, gender, and geographical area) that facilitate communication ties among parliamentarians. Also, we measured party polarization by calculating the external–internal index of the mentions. Dutch MPs’ communication ties arise from network dynamics (reciprocity, brokerage, and popularity) and from MPs’ participation in the parliamentary commissions, age, gender, and geographical area. Furthermore, there is a high degree of cross-party interactions in the Dutch MPs’ mentions Twitter network. Our results refute the existence of “echo chambers” in the Dutch MPs’ mentions Twitter network and support the hypothesis that social media can open up spaces for discussion among political parties. This is particularly important in fragmented consensus democracies where negotiation and coordination between parties to form coalitions is key

Can Euroscepticism Contribute to a European Public Sphere? The Europeanization of Media Discourses about Euroscepticism across Six Countries

This study compares the media discourses about Euroscepticism in 2014 across six countries (United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark). We assess the extent to which the mass media's reporting of Euroscepticism indicates the Europeanization of public spheres. Using a mixed-methods approach combining LDA topic modeling and qualitative coding, we find that approximately 70 per cent of print articles mentioning "Euroscepticism" or "Eurosceptic" are framed in a non-domestic (i.e. European) context. In five of the six cases studied, articles exhibiting a European context are strikingly similar in content, with the British case as the exception. However, coverage of British Euroscepticism drives Europeanization in other Member States. Bivariate logistic regressions further reveal three macro-level structural variables that significantly correlate with a Europeanized media discourse: newspaper type (tabloid or broadsheet), presence of a strong Eurosceptic party, and relationship to the EU budget (net contributor or receiver of EU funds).Comment: 29 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, 2 appendice