Election trolling

Abstract

The use of Twitter as a discussion platform for political issues has led researchers to study its role in predicting election outcomes. This work studies a much neglected aspect of politics on Twitter namely "election trolling" whereby supporters of different political parties attack each other during election campaigns. We also propose a novel strategy to detect terms that are usually not associated with sentiment but are introduced by supporters of political parties to attack the opposing party. We demonstrate a lack of political maturity as evidenced through high percentage of political attacks in a developing region such as Pakistan.

Election Interference

“…Other researchers have examined political trolling manifested as attacks on Twitter [19]. However, little work has investigated more strategic trolling in the social media space.…”

On the frontiers of Twitter data and sentiment analysis in election prediction: a review

“…After the USA elections (2008, 2012, 2016) and the Pakistan elections in 2013, the role of social media in politics, based on sentiment analysis, has been widely studied and examined ( Carlisle & Patton, 2013 ; Wolfsfeld, Segev & Sheafer, 2013 ; Ahmed & Skoric, 2014 ; Razzaq, Qamar & Bilal, 2014 ; Safdar et al, 2015 ). During the research, a lot of election prediction was performed using Twitter data based on sentiment analysis ( He et al, 2019 ; Ahmed & Skoric, 2014 ; Razzaq, Qamar & Bilal, 2014 ; Bagheri & Islam, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2012 ; Younus et al, 2014 ; Kagan, Stevens & Subrahmanian, 2015 ; Nickerson & Rogers, 2014 ). Numerous studies explore the realm of social media prediction, opinion mining, and information network mining techniques to establish standardized approaches to assess the predictive capabilities and limitations associated with the information embedded within social media data ( Cambria, 2016 ; Kreiss, 2016 ; Mahmood et al, 2013 ).…”