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