Everyday elites, citizens, or extremists? Assessing the use and users of non-election political hashtags

Pandering, protesting, engaging. Norwegian party leaders on Facebook during the 2013 ‘Short campaign'

“…Such controversial underpinnings, then, would seem to have a positive effect on the levels of attention gained. Accounting for varying degrees of ideological differences between controversial parties, the result that a comparably provocative party leader would fare well online in this regard is supported in findings from Sweden (Larsson, 2014) as well as from the UK (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010), indicating that contentious political actors might find it fruitful to redress lack of attention in mainstream media by using online technologies, such as Facebook.…”

“…Percentage-wise, Jensen takes a clear lead among her peers (16.7%, N = 8 of her posts are mainly characterized by criticism) a result that can perhaps stem from the somewhat marginalized role of the Progress Party in Norwegian society. While Jensen and her party are firmly established and even gained governmental representation following the election studied here, they can also be understood as marginalized in terms of proposing a stigmatized ideologyright-wing populism (Larsson, 2014). Indeed, a large portion of Jensen's critiquing posts deal with how she herself and the Progress Party in general are wilfully misunderstood by established media actors, criticizing what the politician herself sees as biased reporting.…”

Political protest 2.0: Social media and the 2012 student strike in the province of Quebec, Canada

“…Some sentiment analyses have been conducted (for example, Tumasjan et al, 2010;Raynauld and Greenberg, 2014), but few provide detailed insights into political tweets' content (for example, web links, hashtags). In fact, Larsson (2014) points out that a deeper qualitative and quantitative content analysis of political tweets is required. This article addresses this gap in the academic literature as it uses a hybrid methodological approach to examine formal and informal political players' tweeting patterns during the 2012 Quebec student strike.…”

“…Assessing Twitter's role during the 2009 Iranian election, Solow-Niederman (2010) found that it served mostly as a media channel to bypass state censorship in order to spread information and promote democracy, but also to mobilize citizens on the ground. Larsson (2014) studied political discussions linked to dominant hashtags during electoral campaigns in various European nations (for example, #dax18, #debatten, #svpol). His analysis demonstrated quantitatively that posts of some elite Twitter users -established players and niche political groups -were retweeted more often than other tweeters, thus boosting their influence in the Twitterverse.…”

Top Users and Long Tails: Twitter and Instagram Use During the 2015 Norwegian Elections

“…For example, the use of hashtags, keywords employed by users to thematically "tag" their posted content as relevant for a specific event, occurrence, or topic, is common on both Twitter and Instagram. As such, much like for previous, similar studies (e.g., Bruns & Burgess, 2011;Highfield, Bruns, & Harrington, 2012;Larsson, 2014;Larsson & Moe, 2013;Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2012), hashtags dealing with the election at hand were utilized for the data collection undertaken. While such an approach risks excluding users below "a certain level of Twitter proficiency" (Jungherr, 2014a, p. 244), the selected approach was deemed suitable for practical (González-Bailón, 2013) as well as ethical (Larsson, 2015c) reasons.…”