Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns

Abstract

Against a backdrop of substantial and persistent disruption in Australian federal politics, this article examines the uses of Twitter in campaigning in the 2013 and 2016 federal elections. We comprehensively tracked the tweets posted by, and directed at, all candidates during the final 2 weeks of these campaigns, and compare patterns in candidate and audience activity across the two elections. This documents considerable shifts in campaigning strategies, electorate responses, and central themes of the debate from 2013 to 2016; we show that these shifts are in line with the changing electoral fortunes of Australia's major party blocs during an exceptionally tumultuous period in federal politics.

Twitter and Research: A Systematic Literature Review Through Text Mining

“…Linear trend of the 38 meaningful and relevant topics ( ns P => 0.05; *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001). during the Australian federal elections in 2013 and 2016 [65]. Having an extremely significant change (P < 0.05), politics-related twitter studies have a positive slope indicating increasing research activity.…”

Celebrity Politicians as Health-Promoting Role Models in the Media: the Cases of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu

“…When discussing political communication and self-promotion, most of the politicians’ mediated activities have occurred in traditional media such as television and newspapers, yet with the rise of social media, many politicians identified its potential and have tried to utilize it as well for their own self-promotion (Bruns and Moon 2018 ; Ceccobelli 2018 ; McLaughlin and Macafee 2019 ; Samuel-Azran et al 2018 ; Tamul et al 2020 ; Wells et al 2020 ). Facebook, as one of the leading social media platforms, has been heavily utilized by politicians, especially during elections, for this purpose (Edgerly et al 2016 ; Samuel-Azran et al 2018 ; Talshir 2015 ).…”

Tweet style: campaigning, governing, and social media in Australia

“…Some scholars have looked closely at a manageable number of tweets, using their expertise or teams of research assistants to categorize the text that they contain (Graham et al 2013, Evans and Clark 2016, Graham et al 2016, 2017. Other scholars use computing tools to quantify whether political tweets are original, retweets, or interactions (Grant et al 2010, Bruns and Highfield 2013, Bruns and Moon 2018. Additional work has substituted artificial intelligence for human judgement, leveraging the power of "unsupervised learning' techniques to capture the sentiment of a massive number of tweets (Murthy 2015) 13 or by using the social networks of Twitter followers to infer the ideology of politicians and their followers (Barbera 2015, King, Orlando, and Sparks 2015.…”

“…For America's president and for thousands of politicians across the globe, tweeting has become an increasingly prominent form of political communication. For scholars examining the rhetoric of elected officials, candidates, and even of protesters, Twitter has become an increasingly promising and vital arena to study (Bruns and Moon 2018, Grant et al 2010, Bruns and Highfield 2013, Bruns and Moon 2018, Graham et al 2013, Evans, Cordova, and Sipole 2014, Evans and Clark 2016, Graham et al 2016, 2017, McGregor et al 2016. It provides a vast repository of statements by a wide range of politicians, holding constant their medium of communication whether they are in a campaign cycle or in government.…”

“…I focus on three relevant aspects of tweet style -allocation of resources, presentation of self, and explanation of capitol activity -and set forth hypotheses about how these should shift in response to political circumstances. This project focuses on a country, Australia, in which the adoption of Twitter by politicians has become widespread over the past half-decade and has been studied by Grant et al (2010), Bruns and Highfield (2013), and Bruns and Moon (2018). Because the nation held a long campaign that led to a shift in the control of parliament, it is possible to isolate the impacts both of campaigning and of governing upon the communication of the same set of politicians over time.…”