Characterizing and modeling an electoral campaign in the context of Twitter: 2011 Spanish Presidential election as a case study

Abstract

Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such activity is correlated with the election results. We introduce a new measure to study political support in Twitter, which we call the Relative Support. We have also characterized user behavior by analyzing the structural and dynamical patterns of the complex networks emergent from the mention and retweet networks. Our results suggest that the collective attention is driven by a very small fraction of users. Furthermore we have analyzed the interactions taking place among politicians, observing a lack of debate. Finally we develop a network growth model to reproduce the interactions taking place among politicians.

Analysis of Social Media Influencers and Trends on Online and Mobile Learning

“…Hence, the user accounts with the highest number of mentions by other users are also identified as the influencers on Twitter in this study. Moreover, the retweet mechanism on Twitter enables people to share messages with their followers and provides people a channel to endorse their perspectives regarding specific topic (Borondo, Morales, Losada, & Benito, 2012). A retweet commonly use the "RT @username" text as prefix to credit the original poster (Naaman et al, 2011).…”

Predicción política y Twitter: Elecciones generales de España 2015

“…Así, Zamora y Zurutuza (2014) sobre las elecciones generales de 2011 llegan a la conclusión de que los candidatos presidenciales replican en esta red social las características del discurso político tradicional: unilateral y sin interacción, una conclusión similar a la de Borondo et al (2012) quienes afirman que los candidatos ven en los medios sociales herramientas de las que intentan beneficiarse para ganar votos, pero no como un auténtico canal de comunicación. Olvidan, no obstante, estos estudios el gran potencial de movilización y activismo que poseen las redes, en especial para públicos como los jóvenes , objetivo de toda campaña electoral debido a su dificultad de movilización en estos procesos.…”

Analyzing users’ activity in online social networks over time through a multi-agent framework

“…There are other properties such as in-and out-strength distributions and community structure that are analyzed in a specific point of time. There are other works that focus on understanding the users' interactions related to political events and analyze the evolution of some properties in specific points of time [7,29,33]. Borondo et.…”

“…Borondo et. al [7] analyze topological properties of mention and retweet networks, the cumulative distribution for users' activity, and the percentage of retweets and mentions targeted to politicians and mass media official accounts at the end of the event. They only perform an analysis of the evolution of accumulated tweets over time.…”

“…However, in general, previous works that analyze on-line social networks focus on the analysis of friendship relationships [8,40,39,21] instead of interactions among users. In the area of marketing, the analysis of on-line social networks has been applied to commercial usage, marketing and strategies of persuasion [27], recommender systems [19] and also as social sensor to predict outcomes [7] and to determine potential consumers [2]. It has also been used to determine the users' personality [26,18], to detect the most influential users [35], or to understand how information flows [36].…”