When Politicians Talk About Politics: Identifying Political Tweets of Brazilian Congressmen

Since June 2013, when Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation, a political crisis is in course. In midst of this crisis, Brazilian politicians use social media to communicate with the electorate in order to retain or to grow their political capital. The problem is that many controversial topics are in course and deputies may prefer to avoid such themes in their messages. To characterize this behavior, we propose a method to accurately identify political and non-political tweets independently of the deputy who posted it and of the time it was posted. Moreover, we collected tweets of all congressmen who were active on Twitter and worked in the Brazilian parliament from October 2013 to October 2017. To evaluate our method, we used word clouds and a topic model to identify the main political and non-political latent topics in parliamentarian tweets. Both results indicate that our proposal is able to accurately distinguish political from non-political tweets. Moreover, our analyses revealed a striking fact: more than half of the messages posted by Brazilian deputies are non-political.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

You are What you Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries by Analyzing Food & Drink Habits in Foursquare

Food and drink are two of the most basic needs of human beings. However, as society evolved, food and drink became also a strong cultural aspect, being able to describe strong differences among people. Traditional methods used to analyze cross-cultural differences are mainly based on surveys and, for this reason, they are very difficult to represent a significant statistical sample at a global scale. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to identify cultural boundaries and similarities across populations at different scales based on the analysis of Foursquare check-ins. This approach might be useful not only for economic purposes, but also to support existing and novel marketing and social applications. Our methodology consists of the following steps. First, we map food and drink related check-ins extracted from Foursquare into users' cultural preferences. Second, we identify particular individual preferences, such as the taste for a certain type of food or drink, e.g., pizza or sake, as well as temporal habits, such as the time and day of the week when an individual goes to a restaurant or a bar. Third, we show how to analyze this information to assess the cultural distance between two countries, cities or even areas of a city. Fourth, we apply a simple clustering technique, using this cultural distance measure, to draw cultural boundaries across countries, cities and regions.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Proceedings of 8th AAAI Intl. Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2014

Breaking the News: First Impressions Matter on Online News

A growing number of people are changing the way they consume news, replacing the traditional physical newspapers and magazines by their virtual online versions or/and weblogs. The interactivity and immediacy present in online news are changing the way news are being produced and exposed by media corporations. News websites have to create effective strategies to catch people's attention and attract their clicks. In this paper we investigate possible strategies used by online news corporations in the design of their news headlines. We analyze the content of 69,907 headlines produced by four major global media corporations during a minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In order to discover strategies that could be used to attract clicks, we extracted features from the text of the news headlines related to the sentiment polarity of the headline. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline is strongly related to the popularity of the news and also with the dynamics of the posted comments on that particular news.Comment: The paper appears in ICWSM 201