Live political events on Twitter: The case of the 2015 Election Night in Spain

Abstract

<jats:p>In contemporary democratic society, Twitter can promote a genuine public debate where the discussion is not limited to established social actors. The goal is studying how media outlets, journalists, political parties, candidates, and citizens behave on Twitter while following the 2015 election night in Spain. A quantitative analysis has been used, specifically focused on the activity generated on Twitter during the period of vote counting (n=201,661 tweets). The data was captured with Tweet Binder, a web tool that allows the live monitoring of the flow of tweets related to an event using specific hashtags and keywords. The results reveal that media outlets are at the centre of Twitter activity (representation), but citizens gain high visibility by using humour in the conversation (participation). Founded on the distinctive characteristics of the Spanish context, this article contributes to the understanding of the role of Twitter during a live political event.</jats:p>

Analysis of the Twitter discourse in the 2019 electoral debates in Spain: a comparative algorithmic study

“…The downloads using this method have allowed us to obtain all messages since their collection, carried out after the event, up to seven days before. The official hashtag was used as a search element, linking this research with those carried out by Blas, Moreno and Portilla (2019), which highlight the leadership of journalistic mediation in the choice of tags and help to focus the research by narrowing the scope of the analysis. Of all collected data, only messages sent on the day of the debate, from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. on the following day, were studied.…”

“…Academic studies, however, are more inclined to research based on content analysis of user biographies (Bustos Díaz & Capilla del Fresno, 2013) or certain social issues such as gender (Orbegozo-Terradillos et al, 2020). Along the same lines, papers like the one by Blas et al (2019) have paid attention to the use of Twitter during key political moments such as election night, analyzing which groups lead the conversation on the network and highlighting the institutionalization of content production. Additionally, they have examined how the participation of anonymous users is carried out preferably through retweets, and have expressed the need to study the self-absorption of audiences and their connection to echo chambers.…”

“…Additionally, they have examined how the participation of anonymous users is carried out preferably through retweets, and have expressed the need to study the self-absorption of audiences and their connection to echo chambers. The most frequent contributors are not relevant social players (Blas et al 2019).…”