Politainment on Twitter: Engagement in the Spanish Legislative Elections of April 2019

Abstract

The mediatisation of politics is based on the logic of spectacle. Politainment defines the phenomenon in which political information is trivialised by the hybrid narratives in which it is included and its anecdotal tone, with the aim of reaching an audience that seeks entertainment rather than information. This phenomenon has reached the digital sphere; the media, political parties, and prosumers are interested in using the new communicative context to expand their audience or become producers of new narrative formulas that act as a loudspeaker for online infotainment policies or discourses. This research examines the engagement obtained by politainment producers on Twitter, a network where debates about television content are concentrated. The article examines the tweets issued by Spanish television programmes that carry out politainment. The research focuses on the Spanish general elections held in April 2019 to establish whether this social network acted as a sounding board for television broadcasts and how it contributed to fixing ideas and content. The researchers conducted a content analysis on a sample of 7,059 tweets and 2,771 comments. The results show that the production, promotion, and communication strategies of programmes on Twitter are still scarce and unoriginal. The behaviour of prosumers is not very creative, active, or interactive, preventing the creation of a debate on Twitter or the construction of a horizontal (user–user) or vertical (user–programme) interaction on the content published.

Analyzing Public Reactions, Perceptions, and Attitudes during the MPox Outbreak: Findings from Topic Modeling of Tweets

“…An interesting finding of this study was that the tone of presidential tweets can have significant and divergent effects on the perception of the U.S., even internationally. Beyond the border of the United States, Berrocal-Gonzalo et al [60] found that politainment, the phenomenon of trivializing political information for entertainment purposes, manifested on Twitter during the Spanish general elections in April 2019, which prevented the creation of meaningful debates or interactions surrounding the elections on the platform.…”

Sentiment Analysis and Text Analysis of the Public Discourse on Twitter about COVID-19 and MPox

“…Twitter is the most used social media platform amongst journalists [5] and ranks amongst the most popular social media platforms on a global scale [6]. Twitter has been highly popular amongst data scientists and computer science researchers for studying, analyzing, modeling, and interpreting social media communications related to various topics, such as ChatGPT [7], the Russia-Ukraine war [8], cryptocurrency markets [9], virtual assistants [10], mental health [11], loneliness in the elderly [12], housing needs of low-income families [13], animal welfare [14], climate change [15], cognitive impairment [16], the electronics industry [17], agriculture [18], race and ethnicity [19], fake news [20], abortion [21], religion [22], fall detection [23,24], gender identity [25], elections [26], politics [27], food insufficiency [28], pregnancy [29], drug safety [30], indoor localization [31], gambling [32], education systems [33], exoskeletons [34], personalized medicine [35], natural disasters [36], crimes [37], democracy [38], and transportation [39], just to name a few. In addition to the above, Twitter data mining and analysis has also attracted the attention of healthcare researchers, epidemiologists, and medical practitioners, as is evident from several works that focused on the mining and analysis of tweets related to pandemics, epidemics, viruses, and diseases such as Ebola [40], E-Coli [...…”