Using Social Media Data to Analyse Issue Engagement During the 2017 German Federal Election

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Florian Meier ◽  
Alexander Bazo ◽  
David Elsweiler
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Media Data

A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters’ minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing party statements, press coverage, or TV ads. Here we build on recent work in the areas of computational social science and eDemocracy, which studied these concepts computationally with social media. We operationalize issue engagement and related political science theories to measure and quantify politicians’ communication behavior using more than 366k Tweets posted by over 1,000 prominent German politicians in the 2017 election year. To this end, we first identify issues in posted Tweets by utilising a hashtag-based approach well known in the literature. This method allows several prominent issues featuring in the political debate on Twitter that year to be identified. We show that different political parties engage to a larger or lesser extent with these issues. The findings reveal differing social media strategies by parties located at different sides of the political left-right scale, in terms of which issues they engage with, how confrontational they are and how their strategies evolve in the lead-up to the election. Whereas previous work has analysed the general public’s use of Twitter or politicians’ communication in terms of cross-party polarisation, this is the first study of political science theories, relating to issue engagement, using politicians’ social media data.

Citizens, Elites, and Social Media Methodological Challenges and Opportunities in the Study of Persuasion and Mobilization

2019 ◽  
pp. 1036-1058
Author(s):  
Philip Habel ◽  
Yannis Theocharis
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Media Data

In the last decade, big data, and social media in particular, have seen increased popularity among citizens, organizations, politicians, and other elites—which in turn has created new and promising avenues for scholars studying long-standing questions of communication flows and influence. Studies of social media play a prominent role in our evolving understanding of the supply and demand sides of the political process, including the novel strategies adopted by elites to persuade and mobilize publics, as well as the ways in which citizens react, interact with elites and others, and utilize platforms to persuade audiences. While recognizing some challenges, this chapter speaks to the myriad of opportunities that social media data afford for evaluating questions of mobilization and persuasion, ultimately bringing us closer to a more complete understanding Lasswell’s (1948) famous maxim: “who, says what, in which channel, to whom, [and] with what effect.”

Social media data

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Adrian Tear ◽  
Humphrey Southall
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Population Based ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Data Capture ◽  
Personal Privacy ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Data Validity ◽  
Media Data ◽  
By Products

The increasing availability of huge volumes of social media ‘Big Data’ from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter and other social network platforms, combined with the development of software designed to operate at web scale, has fuelled the growth of computational social science. Often analysed by ‘data scientists’, social media data differ substantially from the datasets officially disseminated as by-products of government-sponsored activity, such as population censuses or administrative data, which have long been analysed by professional statisticians. This chapter outlines the characteristics of social media data and identifies key data sources and methods of data capture, introducing several of the technologies used to acquire, store, query, visualise and augment social media data. Unrepresentativeness of, and lack of (geo)demographic control in, social media data are problematic for population-based research. These limitations, alongside wider epistemological and ethical concerns surrounding data validity, inadvertent co-option into research and protection of user privacy, suggest that caution should be exercised when analysing social media datasets. While care must be taken to respect personal privacy and sample assiduously, this chapter concludes that statisticians, who may be unfamiliar with some of the programmatic steps involved in accessing social media data, must play a pivotal role in analysing it.

Social Media Data and the Dynamics of Thai Protests

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 545-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Nyblade ◽  
Angela O’Mahony ◽  
Aim Sinpeng
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Social Media Analysis ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Media Data

Traditional techniques used to study political engagement—interviews, ethnographic research, surveys—rely on collection of data at a single or a few points in time and/or from a small sample of political actors. They lead to a tendency in the literature to focus on “snapshots” of political engagement (as in the analysis of a single survey) or draw from a very limited set of sources (as in most small group ethnographic work and interviewing). Studying political engagement through analysis of social media data allows scholars to better understand the political engagement of millions of people by examining individuals’ views on politics in their own voices. While social media analysis has important limitations, it provides the opportunity to see detailed “video” of political engagement over time that provides an important complement to traditional methods. We illustrate this point by drawing on social media data analysis of the protests and election in Thailand from October 2013 through February 2014.

scholarly journals The climate change movement and political parties: Mechanisms of social media and interaction during the 2019 electoral period in Finland

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Sonja Savolainen ◽  
Tuomas Ylä-Anttila
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Interaction Dynamics ◽  
The Government ◽  
Media Data

Abstract Building on the framework of electoral contention, we investigate the interaction dynamics between social movements and political parties during elections. We argue that social media today is an important venue for these interactions, and consequently, analysing social media data is useful for understanding the shifts in the conflict and alliance structures between movements and parties. We find that Twitter discussions on the climate change movement during the 2019 electoral period in Finland reveal a process of pre-election approaching and post-election distancing between the movement and parties. The Greens and the Left formed mutually beneficial coalitions with the movement preceding the elections and took distance from one another after these parties entered the government. These findings suggest that research on movement-party interaction should pay more attention to social media and undertake comparative studies to assess whether the approaching-distancing process and its constituent mechanisms characterise movements beyond the climate strikes in Finland.

scholarly journals Fake News Case Study during the Australian 2019 General Election

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Warren
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
General Election ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Research Perspective ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Media Data

Social media is used by all aspects of society from citizens to businesses, but it also now used by political parties. Political parties use social media to engage with voters as a method of attract new voters or reinforcing the views of political parties’ current supporters. An important consideration is the ethical conduct of political parties and politicians in how they use social media. It is now recognized that social media can also have negative aspects seen by the introduction of Fake News. These negative aspects of social media are often overlooked and have not been explored from a research perspective. This paper looks at the Australian 2019 General Election and discusses a major Fake News example that occurred during that election. The paper will also describe the different types of social media data was collected during the study and also present the analysis of the data collected as well discussing the research findings including the ethical issues.

scholarly journals OSoMe: The IUNI observatory on social media

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton A Davis ◽  
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia ◽  
Luca Maria Aiello ◽  
Keychul Chung ◽  
Michael D Conover ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Network Science ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Collaborative Effort ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Derived Data ◽  
Media Data

The study of social phenomena is becoming increasingly reliant on big data from online social networks. Broad access to social media data, however, requires software development skills that not all researchers possess. Here we present the IUNI Observatory on Social Media, an open analytics platform designed to facilitate computational social science. The system leverages a historical, ongoing collection of over 70 billion public messages from Twitter. We illustrate a number of interactive open-source tools to retrieve, visualize, and analyze derived data from this collection. The Observatory, now available at osome.iuni.iu.edu, is the result of a large, six-year collaborative effort coordinated by the Indiana University Network Science Institute.

scholarly journals OSoMe: The IUNI observatory on social media

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton A Davis ◽  
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia ◽  
Luca Maria Aiello ◽  
Keychul Chung ◽  
Michael D Conover ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Network Science ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Collaborative Effort ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Derived Data ◽  
Media Data

The study of social phenomena is becoming increasingly reliant on big data from online social networks. Broad access to social media data, however, requires software development skills that not all researchers possess. Here we present the IUNI Observatory on Social Media, an open analytics platform designed to facilitate computational social science. The system leverages a historical, ongoing collection of over 70 billion public messages from Twitter. We illustrate a number of interactive open-source tools to retrieve, visualize, and analyze derived data from this collection. The Observatory, now available at osome.iuni.iu.edu, is the result of a large, six-year collaborative effort coordinated by the Indiana University Network Science Institute.

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