The EU-Election on Twitter: Comparison of German and French Candidates’ Tweeting styles

Abstract

International audienceIn this chapter the political implications of social media and their affordances for political discourse are examined. The focus is on candidates’ Twitter usage during the 2014 EU elections in France and in Germany. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of tweets collected during a period of four weeks have been carried out on the basis of the functional operator model of Twitter. The model serves as a framework for assessing users’ tweeting styles, which can range between personal-interactive and topical-informative. The comparison of French and German top candidates’ tweeting styles, which mainly appear to be „personal-interactive“, however questions the candidates’ alleged efforts to enter into dialogue with their voters

A taxonomy for classifying user groups in location-based social media

“…The way of communication, or rather how the members use the social media, leads to different classification approaches in the literature. The authors of [26] use the communication tools provided by the Twitter platform and divide the users on a continuum between the categories 'personal-interactive' (higher usage of @ and RT compared to http://) and 'topical-informative' (higher usage of http:// compared to @ and RT). Further related works study the communication process in two different ways.…”