POLITICAL NETWORKS ON TWITTER

2014

New Media & Society

121

Many claims have been made regarding the influence of social media like Facebook on activities undertaken by political actors. While the study of online political communication provides several different perspectives, few studies have attempted to uncover tendencies of so-called permanent campaigning in online environments. The term signifies campaign-like activities at the hands of politicians also during nonelection periods and has spawned a number of conceptual discussions. This article presents an exploratory effort, studying traces of permanent campaigning in two similar countries-Norway and Sweden. As the former of these countries underwent a parliamentary election during the studied period, the study provides insights into "the election effect"-heightened levels of online activity among the Norwegian parties and politicians that can perhaps best be understood in relation to an ongoing election.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online, all the time? A quantitative assessment of the permanent campaign on Facebook

2014

New Media & Society

121

“…As suggested by scholars of journalism (Canter, 2013;Hermida, 2010), "trending" topics or keywords can function as starting points for news stories in mass media outlets. Given that comparably smaller political actors often lack access to such established newspapers or broadcasters, Twitter can thus function as a means to gain access through the gatekeepers of those publications (Gibson & McAllister, 2014)-hopefully resulting in increased attention through the agenda-setting functions of traditional media (Broersma & Graham, 2012;Bruns & Highfield, 2013). This cyclical tendency between normalizing and equalizing tendencies is further strengthened by the apparent tendencies of comparably larger parties to establish clear presences on the more novel of the two services under scrutiny-Instagram.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2017

Social Media + Society

Uses of social media for purposes of political campaigning have become widespread across several electoral contexts. However, as much of the research focused on these issues have dealt primarily with Twitter, relatively little is known regarding how parties make use of other, similar platforms. This article analyzes Twitter and Instagram use during the 2015 Norwegian elections. By adopting a comparative approach, the article suggests a novel approach for applying the often-used normalization and equalization hypotheses. While the former of these hypotheses suggests that larger parties will dominate online, the latter proposes that comparably smaller actors will utilize comparably novel services—such as Instagram in this case—to comparably larger extents than their more sizeable competitors. Contrary to the hypotheses, however, messages primarily relating to smaller actors tended to dominate on Twitter, while larger actors were found to be successful in terms of gaining traction on Instagram.

“…Twitter data were collected by entering suitable key words tracking the official accounts of parties into a localized installation of YourTwapperKeeper (Bruns and Highfield, 2013). The service queries the Search and Stream application programming interfaces (APIs) of Twitter, and while such a noncommercial approach to data collection has potential limitations (Driscoll and Walker, 2014), the limited amount of Twitter use in the Swedish context (Nordicom, 2013;Larsson and Moe, 2013) coupled with our use of delimiting key words (Morstatter et al, 2013) provides confidence regarding the procuration of a full sample of tweets sent in relation to the parties.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These are shown in parentheses in Figure 1 so as to indicate their less than public nature. While citizens might not choose to engage in discussion with political actors in these ways, leaving room instead for the established 'Twitterati' (Bruns and Highfield, 2013), gaining comments, and @replies can be seen as indicative of having an interesting (or controversial or both) message to convey -a message yielding reactions in terms of attempted interaction initiated by social media users.…”

Section: Comparing Feedback Options On Twitter and Facebookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going viral? Comparing parties on social media during the 2014 Swedish election

2016

Convergence

While plenty of research have provided useful insights into political parties' use of Twitter, comparably few efforts have focused on the arguably more popular Facebook service. This article presents a comparative approach, detailing similar functionalities on each platform and providing statistical analyses of the social media activities undertaken by Swedish political parties during the 2014 elections. Moreover, the types of attention and feedback received by these parties are analyzed, suggesting that while sizable parties are not necessarily the most ardent at using their social media presences, they receive the most attention. The study largely complements previous research, suggesting that larger actors receive the bulk of new media attention on both platforms -with some internal variation. However, the role of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats is clearly felt throughout, suggesting the apparent prowess of controversial parties in the online context.