Identifying Political Influencers on YouTube during the 2016 Moroccan General Election

Acharoui, Zakia; Alaoui, Altaf; Ettaki, Badia; Zerouaoui, J.; Dakkon, Mohamed

doi:10.1016/j.procs.2020.03.061

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Alongside traditional broadcast media and face-to-face communication, people now have the ability to search for and exchange information with billions of other users in a global network. Recent studies have examined the impact of new technologies like Twitter and YouTube on election outcomes [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], including the effects of disinformation [23,24,25,26,27,28]. Other studies have documented how social media platforms contribute to polarization through the creation of echo chambers [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting Polarization and Twitter News Influencers between two U.S. Presidential Elections

Flamino¹,

Galezzi²,

Feldman³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional corporate news media. Having hundreds of millions of tweets collected over the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections gave us a unique opportunity to measure the change in polarization and the diffusion of political information. We analyze the diffusion of political information among Twitter users and investigate the change of polarization between these elections and how this change affected the composition and polarization of influencers and their retweeters. We identify "influencers" by their ability to spread information and classify them into those affiliated with a media organization, a political organization, or unaffiliated. Most of the top influencers were affiliated with media organizations during both elections. We found a clear increase from 2016 to 2020 in polarization among influencers and among those whom they influence. Moreover, 75% of the top influencers in 2020 were not present in 2016, demonstrating that such status is difficult to retain. Between 2016 and 2020, 10%

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting Polarization and Twitter News Influencers between two U.S. Presidential Elections

Flamino¹,

Galezzi²,

Feldman³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Alongside traditional broadcast media and face-to-face communication, people now can search for and exchange information with billions of other users in a global network. Recent studies have examined the impact of new technologies, like Twitter and YouTube, on election outcomes [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , including the effects of disinformation [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] . Other studies have documented how social media platforms contribute to polarization through the creation of echo chambers [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Political polarization of news media and influencers on Twitter in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections

et al. 2023

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Social media has been transforming political communication dynamics for over a decade. Here using nearly a billion tweets, we analyse the change in Twitter’s news media landscape between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. Using political bias and fact-checking tools, we measure the volume of politically biased content and the number of users propagating such information. We then identify influencers—users with the greatest ability to spread news in the Twitter network. We observe that the fraction of fake and extremely biased content declined between 2016 and 2020. However, results show increasing echo chamber behaviours and latent ideological polarization across the two elections at the user and influencer levels.

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“…Influencer marketing is considered as a "rapidly growing industry that attempts to promote products or increase brand awareness through content spread by social media users who are considered to be influential" (Carter 2016). Due to their huge online audiences, influencers are often considered as digital opinion leaders (Bause 2021;Soares, Recuero, and Zago 2018;Acharoui et al, 2020;Dubois and Gaffney 2014). Referring to the concept of a two-step flow of communication (Lazarsfeld et al, 1968) opinion leaders are characterized as people who interact with traditional mass media, deal with current issues, reprocess the information and pass them over to other members of their personal networks (Katz 1957, 61).…”

Section: Influencers As Authentic Opinion Leadersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise of Political Influencers—Perspectives on a Trend Towards Meaningful Content

et al. 2021

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Despite an increasing information overflow in the era of digital communication, influencers manage to draw the attention of their followers with an authentic and casual appearance. Reaching large audiences on social media, they can be considered as digital opinion leaders. In the past, they predominantly appeared as experts for topics like fashion, sports, or gaming and used their status to cooperate with brands for marketing purposes. However, since recently influencers also turn towards more meaningful and political content. In this article, we share our perspective on the rise of political influencers using examples of sustainability and related topics covered on Instagram. By applying a qualitative observational approach, we illustrate how influencers make political communication look easy, while at the same time seamlessly integrating product promotions in their social media feeds. In this context, we discuss positive aspects of political influencers like contributions to education and political engagement, but also negative aspects such as the potential amplification of radical political ideology or conspiracy theories. We conclude by highlighting political influencers as an important research topic for conceptual and empirical studies in the future.

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Identifying Political Influencers on YouTube during the 2016 Moroccan General Election

Cited by 8 publications

References 25 publications

Shifting Polarization and Twitter News Influencers between two U.S. Presidential Elections

Shifting Polarization and Twitter News Influencers between two U.S. Presidential Elections

Political polarization of news media and influencers on Twitter in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections

The Rise of Political Influencers—Perspectives on a Trend Towards Meaningful Content

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