No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Does the early bird move the polls? The use of the social media tool 'Twitter' by U.S. politicians and its impact on public opinion
Abstract
Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have been hailed as politically transformative communications technologies, on the level of previous politically significant technological innovations, such as radio and television. In this paper we estimate the impact of the use of the social media tool 'Twitter' by American politicians on changes in public opinion of those politicians over time, and we find little evidence that the political use of Twitter has eitther a positive or negative impact on public opinion. We run simple regressions of changes in widely used U. S. public opinion polls, estimating the association between favorable impressions of selected politicians and the social media usage levels (number of 'Tweets') of those politicians. In order to get a reliable estimate, we ran the same regressions for public opinion polls conducted by three different companies (CNN/Opinion Research, Gallup, and ABC/Washington Post) and we find that the estimated coefficients are not significant for any of the tested opinion polls.
... All modern democracies have embraced social media as a tool to engage their people, engage in direct interaction, and promote lively political dialogues in a relatively short amount of time (Hong and Nadler 2011). The United States is considered to be a trailblazer in this regard, with Barack Obama's usage of social media during his last election campaign being the most prominent (Wattal et al. 2010). ...
... If you're a member of the minority party, if your party leaders urge you to use Twitter, if you're young, or if you're serving in the Senate, you're more likely to use Twitter than a member of the majority party. Hong and Nadler (2011) find no evidence that the use of Twitter by American politicians to measure public opinion changes over time has a positive or negative influence on public opinion. Through the usage of the #IranElection hashtag, Gaffney (2010) examines Twitter use by Iranian voters during the 2009 Iranian elections. ...
Recently, it has been stated that social media has had a significant impact on public debate and communication. Politicians are increasingly utilizing social media. Twitter and other microblogging platforms (such as Facebook) have been proposed to enhance political involvement in recent years. Facebook pages and groups have been used by political institutions (e.g., political parties and foundations) to engage in direct dialogue with citizens and encourage more political discussions, while Twitter is an ideal platform for users to spread information in general and political opinions publicly through their networks. According to prior study, political institutions are increasingly required to acquire, monitor, analyses, synthesize, and present social media material that is politically relevant. As a result of the enormous variety of social media platforms and the volume and complexity of information and data involved in them, these activities are referred to as “social media analytics” Systematic tracking and analytic approaches as well as scientific processes and techniques are still lacking in the political domain This paper proposes a methodological framework for social media analytics in political setting.
... Twitter acts as a distributed sociotechnical sensor system [22,23]. Using Storywrangler, we can trace major news events and stories-from serious matters such as natural disasters [24][25][26][27][28] and political events [29] to entertainment such as sports, music, and movies. ...
... Appendix E: Geopolitical risk case study Twitter sentiment has already been shown to provide a useful signal in monitoring public opinion [22,23]. ...
In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through 'contagiograms'.
... When the social media are used for general interaction, information, and entertainment purposes, political information may enter the visual field of users at any time. In modern democracies, more and more politicians and governments are adopting social media sites as tools for collecting and responding to the opinions of citizens prior to election campaigns and in order to establish community support [26,41,58]. Social media users, particularly young users, find that communicating about political issues has become far easier and more convenient than ever before as government agencies and political institutions are constantly collecting and analyzing usage data to improve visitor experience [12,53]. ...
... It is not surprising to find that users, and particularly younger users, are increasingly likely to become involved in communication around the news and political issues on social media platforms. In a context where young people spend large amounts of time in their online communities for both interaction and entertainment [9,22,35,42], appeals and propositions posted on social media sites are more accessible to young audiences than they would have been through the traditional media [26]. Political institutions and governors have responded by opening and operating their own channels to collect and review the opinions of users [41,58]. ...
Radical political activities can harm social stability and economic performance. With a three-wave dataset for a sample of young people in Hong Kong, this study evaluated a cross-lagged model to evaluate the development of radical political participation. The results showed that social media use significantly increased the online political communication of the young people and that this significantly promoted their radical political participation. This was mediated by a significant increase in the heterogeneity of their social media network. These findings contribute to the further development of communication mediation theory in the field of political behaviors. They provide an in-depth understanding of the development of radical political behavior among young people and offer practical suggestions for policy makers and educators who are striving to reduce mass radical political engagement.
... The use of Twitter and other online platforms has been on the rise in the past years' elections [1] [2] [3] [4]. Politicians are using Twitter to engage with their supporters by sharing ideas and receiving feedback on different issues. ...
... In order to assess the emotions portrayed in those tweets, the study used text analysis software since it was important to capture the degree of emotions present in those sentiments to determine voters' preferences in politicians and parties. It was revealed that the more times a party or a politician is mentioned, the higher the chances of being elected are since these mentions were a true reflection of the election results (but see [2] [3]). Moreover, the findings of the study indicated that Twitter is a polit- ical platform which enables sharing of ideas. ...
... In recent years, social media activities have become a prominent aspect of campaigns, with candidates using platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to connect with voters, share campaign messages and engage in direct interactions with the public (Arag on, 2016). The emergence of social media has brought about a revolutionary shift, creating a new paradigm for political communication and fundamentally altering the foundation of the political process (Gainous and Wagner, 2013), fostering direct dialogues with citizens and facilitating vibrant political discussions (Hong and Nadler, 2011). ...
Purpose
Social media platforms are highly visible platforms, so politicians try to maximize their benefits from their use, especially during election campaigns. On the other side, people express their views and sentiments toward politicians and political issues on social media, thus enabling them to observe their online political behavior. Therefore, this study aims to investigate user reactions on social media during the 2016 US presidential campaign to decide which candidate invoked stronger emotions on social media.
Design/methodology/approach
For testing the proposed hypotheses regarding emotional reactions to social media content during the 2016 presidential campaign, regression analysis was used to analyze a data set that consists of Trump’s 996 posts and Clinton’s 1,253 posts on Facebook. The proposed regression models are based on viral (likes, shares, comments) and emotional Facebook reactions (Angry, Haha, Sad, Surprise, Wow) as well as Russell’s valence, arousal, dominance (VAD) circumplex model for valence, arousal and dominance.
Findings
The results of regression analysis indicate how Facebook users felt about both presidential candidates. For Clinton’s page, both positive and negative content are equally liked, while Trump’s followers prefer funny and positive emotions. For both candidates, positive and negative content influences the number of comments. Trump’s followers mostly share positive content and the content that makes them angry, while Clinton’s followers share any content that does not make them angry. Based on VAD analysis, less dominant content, with high arousal and more positive emotions, is more liked on Trump’s page, where valence is a significant predictor for commenting and sharing. More positive content is more liked on Clinton’s page, where both positive and negative emotions with low arousal are correlated to commenting and sharing of posts.
Originality/value
Building on an empirical data set from Facebook, this study shows how differently the presidential candidates communicated on social media during the 2016 election campaign. According to the findings, Trump used a hard campaign strategy, while Clinton used a soft strategy.
... As stated by Zheng (2015) political institutes believe that the active engagement in political communication by utilizing social media is important, especially at the time of the campaign period. Numerous politicians make use of social media to communicate with their voters and have dialogue with them (Hong & Nadler, 2011). Not long ago, Facebook and Twitter apps as in WhatsApp also acted as an essential role in political involvement (Salman & Saad, 2015). ...
... As stated by Zheng (2015) political institutes believe that the active engagement in political communication by utilizing social media is important, especially at the time of the campaign period. Numerous politicians make use of social media to communicate with their voters and have dialogue with them (Hong & Nadler, 2011). Not long ago, Facebook and Twitter apps as in WhatsApp also acted as an essential role in political involvement (Salman & Saad, 2015). ...
... Media is unquestionably an agent of memory (Meyers 2007;Neiger et al. 2011;Peri 1999) and a major site where collective memory is played out (Hoskins 2011;Huyssen 2000;Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2014;Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2008;Zelizer 1995). It is also a site where a significant amount of public discourse occurs (e.g., Alexander and Jacobs 1998;Azpíroz 2013;Edy 2011;Hong and Nadler 2011;Sheafer & Shenhav 2009;Wolfsfeld et al. 2013;Young & Soroka 2012), thus constituting in this research a major data source. Media is not only a prominent platform through which memory is constructed and re-constructed to achieve a political and societal agenda (see Tirosh 2017;Sonnevend 2016). ...
Holocaust memory in Europe is shifting and diversifying, often in conflicting ways. This report is the culmination of a comparative and multidisciplinary study aimed at exploring these contemporary shifts in Holocaust memory in five European countries that played very different roles during the Holocaust, and whose post-WWII histories differed too: Poland, Hungary, Germany, England and Spain. The study took place from 2019-2022 and offers a snapshot of Holocaust memory at the start of the 21st century. In addition to the rise of far-right political parties, antisemitic incidents and crises around immigration and refugees, this period was also overshadowed by the Covid pandemic and its ensuing economic instability. Our central guiding question was: How do experiences of the present relate to the memory of the Holocaust? Do they supersede it, leading to the gradual fading from memory of the mass-murder that shook the twentieth century? Do they reshape it, shedding new light on its lessons? Is the meaning assigned to present-day events shaped by its metaphors and symbols, or perhaps the present and the past engage in multidirectional dialogue over diverse memory platforms? To explore this question and other questions about the extent to which Holocaust memory is present in European public discourses, the circumstances in which it surfaces, and the differences in its expressions in the countries we examined, we focused on three complementary domains that serve as memory sites: the public-political, Holocaust education and social media. We used a between/within analysis matrix of the countries and the domains, to understand how Holocaust memory is expressed in these countries. We found that while the memory of the Holocaust remains alive, in some places it is struggling for relevance. A common memory practice that surfaced across domains was “relationing the Holocaust,” a variant of multidirectional memory. We also found that a distinguishing aspect of Holocaust memory relates to the political left-right identification of subgroups within countries. There were also interactions between domains and countries, for example, in the countries we explored in Western Europe, teachers’ attitudes about the Holocaust corresponded to those of their political establishment, but this was not the case in Central and Eastern Europe. This report is intended for Holocaust and memory scholars, educators, commemorators, policymakers, journalists and anyone interested in deciphering the complex intersections of past and present. The report culminates with a series of recommendations for various policymakers, NGOs, educational organizations and social media moderators.
... Media is unquestionably an agent of memory (Meyers 2007;Neiger et al. 2011;Peri 1999) and a major site where collective memory is played out (Hoskins 2011;Huyssen 2000;Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2014;Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2008;Zelizer 1995). It is also a site where a significant amount of public discourse occurs (e.g., Alexander and Jacobs 1998;Azpíroz 2013;Edy 2011;Hong and Nadler 2011;Sheafer & Shenhav 2009;Wolfsfeld et al. 2013;Young & Soroka 2012), thus constituting in this research a major data source. Media is not only a prominent platform through which memory is constructed and re-constructed to achieve a political and societal agenda (see Tirosh 2017;Sonnevend 2016). ...
Holocaust memory in Europe is shifting and diversifying, often in conflicting ways. This report is the culmination of a comparative and multidisciplinary study aimed at exploring these contemporary shifts in Holocaust memory in five European countries that played very different roles during the Holocaust, and whose post-WWII histories differed too: Poland, Hungary, Germany, England and Spain. The study took place from 2019-2022 and offers a snapshot of Holocaust memory at the start of the 21st century. In addition to the rise of far-right political parties, antisemitic incidents and crises around immigration and refugees, this period was also overshadowed by the Covid pandemic and its ensuing economic instability. Our central guiding question was: How do experiences of the present relate to the memory of the Holocaust? Do they supersede it, leading to the gradual fading from memory of the mass-murder that shook the twentieth century? Do they reshape it, shedding new light on its lessons? Is the meaning assigned to present-day events shaped by its metaphors and symbols, or perhaps the present and the past engage in multidirectional dialogue over diverse memory platforms? To explore this question and other questions about the extent to which Holocaust memory is present in European public discourses, the circumstances in which it surfaces, and the differences in its expressions in the countries we examined, we focused on three complementary domains that serve as memory sites: the public-political, Holocaust education and social media. We used a between/within analysis matrix of the countries and the domains, to understand how Holocaust memory is expressed in these countries. We found that while the memory of the Holocaust remains alive, in some places it is struggling for relevance. A common memory practice that surfaced across domains was “relationing the Holocaust,” a variant of multidirectional memory. We also found that a distinguishing aspect of Holocaust memory relates to the political left-right identification of subgroups within countries. There were also interactions between domains and countries, for example, in the countries we explored in Western Europe, teachers’ attitudes about the Holocaust corresponded to those of their political establishment, but this was not the case in Central and Eastern Europe. This report is intended for Holocaust and memory scholars, educators, commemorators, policymakers, journalists and anyone interested in deciphering the complex intersections of past and present. The report culminates with a series of recommendations for various policymakers, NGOs, educational organizations and social media moderators.
... Grateful and avoidance mechanisms explained a large amount of variation in a few political variables, including issue accuracy, the likelihood of voting, interest in campaigns, the intensity of political conversation, and the perceived differences between candidates. Based on these data, they created a transactional reward model [37][38][39][40]. Audience orientations, in addition to demographics and other aspects of media exposure, were found to clarify the effects of the media [41,42]. ...
The use of social media for political thought and expression has given the study of political communication a new dimension. We endeavored to discover in social media which political topics students found more interesting in conversation. In addition, this study combines communication theories such as uses and gratification and to analyze political interest in social media and the formation of political opinion. Specifically, we attempted to compare the extent of political communication participation based on gender and academic education. A survey reveals that male students are more involved in political communication than female students. And final year students are more engaged in political communication via social media than their first, second, and third-year counterparts. Using the quantitative method of data collection and program language R to analyze them, this study also explores students’ expression of political opinions through social media has a relationship to their political needs. The results here show that freedom of expression given in our constitution if exercised properly, students will be able to engage in political communication.
... All tweets (except for people who make their Twitter pages private) are public and accessible to followers and non-followers, which allows all Twitter users to interact with and join a discussion, enabling vigorous virtual political conversations (Hong & Nadler, 2011). It also allows acting as a counterweight to conventional public discourses (Bruns, 2018). ...
In April 2019, Trump criticized Puerto Rican politicians on Twitter for receiving $91 billion in aid from Washington and said Puerto Rico was taking money from the U.S. Even though Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, their political status is the result of a series of colonial policies that ensured an important degree of U.S. political control over their island. Combining topic modeling and network analysis of 8,256 tweets on Puerto Rico between March 29 and April 8, 2019, we examine the reactions to Trump’s tweets and study the discourses, contestations, and counter-hegemonic rhetorical articulations that attended the tweets. Most responses to the tweets allowed for the creation of a counterpublic space that challenged Trump’s depiction of Puerto Rico. However, these responses also reproduced the unexamined hegemonic colonial ideology at the heart of Puerto Rico’s unequal relationship with the US. We argue that by failing to acknowledge the colonial entrapment that defines Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, even the counterpublic discourses against Trump’s rhetoric unwittingly reinforce the colonial relationship.
... В контексте общемировой политизации цифрового контента, активного использования социальных медиа представителями политического истеблишмента для обсуждения актуальной повестки, коммуникации с избирателям или проведения дискуссий с оппонентами [Hong, Nadler, 2011], а также рядовыми пользователями для общения с единомышленниками или участия в общественно-политических мероприятиях [Stieglitz, Dang-Xuan, 2012: 1277] политическая «индифферентность» российской аудитории цифровых медиа выглядит вынужденной. Это можно объяснить строгостью российского законодательства в отношении возможностей политического самовыражения «в сети». ...
В статье рассматривается влияние социальных медиа на общественно-политические установки граждан, политическую коммуникацию и низовой активизм. Обращаясь к социологическим данным, автор резюмирует, что регулярное общение с единомышленниками в электронных медиа прямо не влечет роста социально-политической заинтересованности, осознанности или субъектности, непосредственно не мотивирует граждан к низовой самоорганизации и социально-политической активности. Вместе с тем культивируемая социальными медиа дискуссионная культура общения, предоставляемые ими ресурсы для свободного общения формируют у регулярных пользователей интернета и социальных сетей запрос на публичное выражение взглядов, в том числе и политических, информационную открытость и коммуникативную свободу. Среди российской аудитории социальных медиа выше запрос на перемены в стране и обществе.
Благодарность. Исследование выполнено за счет гранта Российского научного фонда (проект № 20-18-00505) в Федеральном научно-исследовательском социологическом центре Российской академии наук.
... The impact of media include social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. have become quite important, especially when there is no other source of information on a specific topic available. Social media has influenced the way people interact and create a novel way for users to quickly approach one another (Hong and Nadler, 2011). Social media does not just keep in touch with relatives, colleagues and loved ones. ...
Purpose: During COVID-19, migrant labourers had suffered the most in India for which the Indian government has launched One Nation One Ration scheme to provide ration under the Public Distribution System. But this scheme has received mixed reactions from the public and created buzz on Twitter. This study aimed to identify the most frequent topics in tweets discussed by the public, along with the sentiments associated. Methodology: The current study is exploratory and descriptive based analysis of the text extracted from Twitter. Total 11,504 tweets were extracted using R Software and analyzed by applying NRC based sentiment analysis and Louvain Method of network analysis. Findings: Identified eleven clusters of topics which were discussed the most in response to the scheme ONOR with particular focus on providing ration to migrants amid COVID-19. Amongst anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust; trust is found to be more for the scheme by the public. Originality: This study has contributed by exploring the public opinion for the government’s Public Distribution Scheme to overcome hunger crisis using machine learning techniques.
... The tweet "The concept of global warming was created by and for Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive," was retweeted, according to reports by The New York Times, over 104,000 times, and "liked" nearly 66,000 times (Wong, 2016). It is suggested that his tweets about global warming had a great impact on people's view of it, since social media, especially Twitter, has been an important place for political communication, influencing a large number of people's opinions (Buccoliero et al., 2020;Hong & Nadler, 2011). ...
With the increasing extreme weather events and various disasters, people are paying more attention to environmental issues than ever, particularly global warming. Public debate on it has grown on various platforms, including newspapers and social media. This paper examines the topics and sentiments of the discussion of global warming on Twitter over a span of 18 months using two big data analytics techniques: topic modelling and sentiment analysis. There are seven main topics concerning global warming frequently debated on Twitter: factors causing global warming, consequences of global warming, actions necessary to stop global warming, relations between global warming and COVID-19, global warming’s relation with politics, global warming as a hoax, and global warming as a reality. The sentiment analysis shows that most people express positive emotions about global warming, though the most evoked emotion found across the data is fear, followed by trust. The study provides a general and critical view of the public’s principal concerns and their feelings about global warming on Twitter.
... Political candidates and voters use Twitter to discuss social and political issues, sharing information and encouraging political participation (Kushin and Yamamoto 2010). Politicians in particular, especially in recent years, have eagerly embraced social media tools to self-promote and communicate with their electorate, seeing in these tools the potential for changing public opinion especially during election campaigns (Hong and Nadler 2011). Given the rapid growth of politician's engagement through Twitter, there is plenty of research on how the platform is used for political communication. ...
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies especially in the western world (e.g., 48% of Europeans use social media every day or almost every day). Platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agenda aiming to influence voter behaviour. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets from politicians from different countries and explore if their tweets follow the same trend. Utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models we performed sentiment analysis on multilingual tweets collected from members of parliament of Greece, Spain and United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting trends in the intersection of sentiment and popularity.
... Over the years, social media has gained massive popularity in political situations. Political individuals have actively started using social platforms to express views, opinions and emotions and to engage with the public (Dang-Xuan et al., 2013;Hong and Nadler, 2011). Political influencers are said to have opinion-making power through communication, and these communication methods are changing with the emerging social mediums. ...
This article examines the frames used by Pakistani news media while covering a political protest in 2019 on Twitter. The study deploys quantitative content analysis based on thematic framing, episodic framing, genre, types and subject matter of tweets. In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the use of Twitter in political and protest communication. Twitter is a platform with the potential to manage and coordinate protest activities and movements effectively. The current study is carried out to demonstrate the importance of one of the aspects of political protest communication. Tweets (N = 498) posted between 20 October and 20 November 2019 by three mainstream Pakistani media organizations ( Dawn, The News, Express Tribune) were collected and analysed. Results show that straight news was used more in episodic frames by the media organizations on Twitter. Results of the study add to the increasing body of studies showing that media outlets have also embraced modern media to use frames while covering political issues.
... To study the dynamics of this Twitter firestorm, we use historical data from the 10% sample application programming interface (API) data of Twitter: a random 10% of all tweets over a three week period around the time of the incident. While Twitter's data samples are viewed critically in academia (Pfeffer et al 2018), they are widely used as a data source by social media teams of companies, business consultants and government entities for real-time analysis of public opinion (Hong and Nadler 2011;Younus et al 2011;Cody et al 2016). For the purpose of this case study, we extracted 110,898 tweets including the term "mcdonalds" (case insensitive). ...
People leave millions of digital traces in the big data ecosystem. This ecosystem is a huge network with millions of daily personal transactions. And each of these transactions leaves traces that may be compiled into comprehensive information about individual and group behaviour. The capacity to collect huge amounts of data transforms the way people and organisations work and behave; hence, the market starts to react faster and increasingly anticipates traditional or other data sources. Data-driven computational economics capture changes in market, attitude and consumer behaviour over time and in real time. However, the quantitative techniques of machine learning have been applied to demonstrate a shift from a discretionary to a quantitative investment style. An increasing share of human interaction, communication and culture is recorded as digital text. Text is used as an input to economic research. Statistical methods and deep learning methods are applied to digital texts, as such data provides a rich repository of information about economic and social activity. More interesting for behavioural economics are the large-scale studies of social behaviour. This book chapter on advanced statistical analysis of large-scale Web-based data is intended to provide an overview of methods, application areas, and possible pitfalls for decision-makers in economics and finance.
... In a study of Facebook posts by senatorial candidates in 2010, Auter and Fine find that both candidates running in competitive races, and the unfavored candidate in a noncompetitive race, were the most negative in their posts. Often the minority party makes more use of new technologies as a platform to better communicate its dissent (Ansley and Sellers 2010, Hong and Nadler 2011, Parmelee and Bichard 2011, Russell 2018. Minority party members are found to be more "negative" than majority party members in mailings to their districts Lipinski (2004), demonstrating that partisanship matters in congressional communications. ...
How does the lack of institutional legislative power and influence in the House of Representatives shape politicians’ rhetoric? In previous work, we found evidence that members of Congress in the minority and the party opposing the president were more negative in the language they used on Twitter. In this project, we dive deeper into their negative tweets and theorize under what conditions we expect representatives to be more likely to use them. We offer a plan of how to leverage almost 2 million unique tweets made by representatives 2013-2018 to assess the impact of a representative’s political power, or lack thereof, on her use of different methods of strategic negative sentiment in her tweets. Given the increasing contention between the two parties on- and offline, it is unlikely that the use of negative rhetoric and its potentially harmful impact on American government and congress will decrease in the near future.
... Over time, and not without setbacks, Twitter has become an important global social media service. Amplifying and reflecting real world stories, Twitter is globally entrained with politics and news, sports, music, and culture, and also performs as a distributed sensor system for natural disasters and emergencies [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Like any scientific enterprise, empirical research involving Twitter and social media in general depends fundamentally on the quality of data [7]. ...
Maintaining the integrity of long-term data collection is an essential scientific practice. As a field evolves, so too will that field's measurement instruments and data storage systems, as they are invented, improved upon, and made obsolete. For data streams generated by opaque sociotechnical systems which may have episodic and unknown internal rule changes, detecting and accounting for shifts in historical datasets requires vigilance and creative analysis. Here, we show that around 10\% of day-scale word usage frequency time series for Twitter collected in real time for a set of roughly 10,000 frequently used words for over 10 years come from tweets with, in effect, corrupted language labels. We describe how we uncovered problematic signals while comparing word usage over varying time frames. We locate time points where Twitter switched on or off different kinds of language identification algorithms, and where data formats may have changed. We then show how we create a statistic for identifying and removing words with pathological time series. While our resulting process for removing `bad' time series from ensembles of time series is particular, the approach leading to its construction may be generalizeable.
... This literature has taken at least six directions. First, the studies have focused on election process events such as campaigns and campaign contributions (e.g., Hong and Nadler 2011;Metaxas and Eni 2012;DiGrazia et al. 2013;Petrova et al. 2016). Second, other works have considered specific political events (Conover et al. 2013;Enikolopov et al. 2017;Adamic and Glance 2005;Halberstam and Knight 2016). ...
In this paper, we study the relationship between communication and “transparency of information” and governance by exploring the link between social media and natural resource governance. Using a cross-country analysis, we document a robust and statistically significant positive relationship between Facebook penetration (a proxy for social media) and natural resource governance. It follows that countries with higher social media levels enjoy natural resource governance of better quality than countries with low levels of social media. The positive effect of social media is robust to controlling for other determinants of institutional quality, additional controls, and outliers, inter alia.
... Karena media sosial dapat menjadi channel untuk merepresentasikan informasi yang ideal, mengukur opini publik, serta mendapatkan dukungan dari publik kepada kandidat politiknya (Zeng, Chen, Lusch, & Li, 2010). Penelitian terdahulu menunjukkan bahwa politisi di era demokrasi yang modern ini dengan semangat mengadopsi media sosial untuk melibatkan publik, berdialog dengan warganya sehingga memunculkan diskusi politik yang 'hidup' (Hong & Nadler, 2011). Selain itu, dengan adanya media sosial memungkinkan masyarakat untuk mendapat informasi dan pengaruh pilihan politik, dari mulai sikap, kepercayaan, dan perilaku mereka terhadap kandidat politik tertentu (Victor, Ikechukwu, Gerald, & Chinedum, 2017). ...
Political candidates are actively using Facebook's social media as a political communication strategy, for which there is social interaction and interactive dialogues between the candidates and the public in virtual space, where this is needed to influence public involvement in achieving their political missions. Therefore, the objective of this study is to describe the influence of the use of social media Facebook as a political communication strategy on the electability, effectiveness, and popularity of the candidates of the DPR RI members in 2019 legislative elections. The research used theories and concepts of political communication and the use of social media in political communication, using quantitative research methods and surveys of 30 Facebook user respondents and voters in the 2019 legislative elections. The results showed there was an impact of Facebook utilization on the electability by 16%, on effectiveness by 39.7%, and on the popularity of prospective members of the DPR RI in the 2019 legislative elections by 17.3%. Users can actively collect information and opinions using this site as a place of communication between themselves with the politicians or with fellow supporters. However, the use of Facebook is not the only effective political communication strategy, traditional media such as television, radio, billboards, stickers are still effective to reach the public who do not always use social media.
... Although outgunned by Hillary Clinton in fundraising and having spent a fifth of Hillary Clinton's campaign on TV election ads, Donald Trump managed to prevail, also thanks to his ability to win on the social media battlefield (Faris et al., 2017). Facebook in particular has firmly established itself as a central platform for political communication, not only for militants of different political parts but also for parties and politicians, which use their official Facebook pages as a key mean of political communication (Hong & Nadler, 2011;Larsson & Moe, 2011;Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2012). Facebook is still at some distance compared to 78% on television, but its influence has been growing in recent years, especially among young people (Duggan & Smith, 2016;Gottfried, Barthel, Shearer, & Mitchell, 2016). ...
Social media are widely held to have played an important role in the 2017 UK general elections. But it is not altogether clear how exactly they contributed to the communication battle between Labour and the Conservatives. This article analyses the posts and comments on the official Facebook pages of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party and their respective leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. We look at the relationship between topics, emotions, and user engagement. Labour clearly outperformed the Tories, with Corbyn’s personal page having 10 times the interactions of May’s. We retrieve part of the reason for this success in the “positive posting” strategy adopted by Labour and the way it helped to attract user engagement. While the Conservative Party focused on negative issues such as Brexit, terrorism, and national security, Labour focused on positive issues, such as the promise of higher social spending and appeals to the grassroots, generating far higher levels of engagement. Overall, positive topic tended to fare better than more negative and controversial issues, such as security and Brexit. Our findings thus suggest the need for a more balanced understanding of the relationship between content, emotions, and user engagement on social media, moving beyond simplistic views of social media politics as necessarily biased in favor of aggressive and negative campaigning.
... Interesting is the case study of populist leaders who use Social Networks with the same vertical logic of traditional mass media (Waisbord & Amado, 2017). With regard to the use of the "tribune effect", several scholars have adopted the number of messages as a metric to detect influence in public discourse, partly by finding a correlation with changes in opinion polls that measure the favorable impressions of politicians (Hong & Nadler, 2011). The results are discordant regarding the distinction between traditional candidates and parties and new political forces. ...
The outcomes of a bibliographic review on political communication, in particular electoral communication in social networks, are presented here. The electoral campaigning are a crucial test to verify the transformations of the media system and of the forms and uses of the linguistic acts by dominant actors in public sphere – candidates, parties, journalists and Gatekeepers. The aim is to reconstruct the first elements of an analytical model on the transformations of the political public sphere, with which to systematize the results of the main empirical research carried out in recent years, in particular those conducted with a promising methodology: Digital Trace Data Analysis.
Riassunto. La comunicazione politica nei social network. Campagne elettorali e Digital Trace Data Analysis: una rassegna bibliografica Sono qui presentati i risultati di una rassegna bibliografica sulla comunicazione politica, in particolare la comunicazione elettorale nei social network. Le campagne elettorali sono un test cruciale per verificare le trasformazioni del sistema mediale e delle forme e degli usi degli atti linguistici da parte degli attori dominanti nella sfera pubblica-candidati, partiti, giornalisti e gatekeepers. L'obiettivo è quello di ricostruire i primi elementi di un modello analitico sulle trasformazioni della sfera pubblica politica, con cui sistematizzare i risultati delle principali ricerche empiriche condotte negli ultimi anni, in particolare quelle condotte con una metodologia promettente: la Digital Trace Data Analysis.
... The potentials of social media are most promising in the political context as they can be an enabler for more participation and democracy. Hong and Nadler (2011) have shown that the political use of Twitter by US politicians have no impact on changing or influencing public opinion either negatively or positively. Boulianne (2015) in her meta-analysis of research on social media use and participation has shown that there are positive relations between social media use and participation, but questions remain about whether these relationships are causal and transformative. ...
Analyzing President Trump’s Tweets (N = 30,386) with the first tweet starting from 4 May 2009, this article looks at the nature of his conversations with the public and the building of public support for his candidacy, till he assumed office on January 2017. Drawing theoretically on deliberative democracy and technological populism as performance, this study, among the earliest to use interpretative qualitative analysis, reveals the different themes in his discourse, rather than only highlight specific attributes of his tweets. Our analysis shows that Trump tweets frequently and casts himself as a political outsider who can alone save America. His racist and sexist language with his confrontational style leaves no room for deliberative discourse. His messages may be populist in character, but they are aversive and uncivil and lack normative attributes of deliberation that one would expect in the leader of a powerful nation, such as the United States. These characteristics have been present in his tweets even as a private citizen. This research makes a new contribution to our understanding of how Trump uses Twitter, starting from before he emerged as a contender for the presidential office, and the discourses that emanate from his use of Twitter to make broader inferences about the messages the public is receiving from Trump.
... There was a significant change in the General Elections 2014 from the General Elections 2009; this was the change in the role played by the social media during the elections. It has been observed worldwide that the democracies have been engaging in dialogues with the public over the social media [16]. As per Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) the Internet users in India are expected to be 243 million by June 2014, marking a 28% growth from June 2013. ...
... Park, 2013). Looking at American politicians on Twitter, Hong and Nadler (2011) and Nielsen (2011) find that their tweets had little impact on public opinion. More recent research in European countries indicates a change; Frame and Brachotte's study (2015), for instance, shows that some French politicians are actively engaging on Twitter. ...
The internet and social media have been credited with the potential to reinvigorate democracy by offering new avenues of political participation and communication between citi-zens and politicians. The results of empirical studies, however, call for caution, as many politi-cians refrain from fully exploring the interactive potential of new media. This case study focus-es on the web presence of Korean parliamentarians, using basic statistical analyses to explore the use of ICT as a means of political communication. It finds that Korean parliamentarians are less active online, treating ICT mainly as another channel for information distribution. It is thus concluded that ICT is not revolutionizing politics but reinforcing existing patterns of communi-cation that leave a gap between citizens and representatives. This paper was previously submit-ted to CeDem Asia 2016. The literature review and the methodology section have been expand-ed, and additional statistical data as well as further findings on Twitter were added.
... Whereas there is considerable research on social media use for political communication and elections in Europe and the U.S. (Hong & Nadler, 2011;O'Conner et al., 2010;Vergeer et al., 2011), as yet little research has explored the adoption of social media by politicians in the Global South and specifically in Kenyan elections, and more so with the creation of new political offices. Therefore, there is need for scholarly analysis and investigation into the determinants of social media adoption for political marketing in Kenya. ...
This study seeks to establish the determinants of social media adoption for political marketing in Kenya. The study is guided by the diffusion of innovations theory. The study utilizes the mixed methods sequential explanatory design. Politicians who contested at the presidential, gubernatorial, senatorial, women representative and parliamentary levels in the 2013 general elections in Kenya comprise the study population. The Fisher’s Formula for finite population drew a sample size of 338 respondents from a total population of 2807 political candidates. Stratified random sampling was used to ensure representation from politicians across the national and devolved levels. Data was collected using questionnaires and interview guides. The quantitative data obtained from the administration of questionnaires was analysed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics to answer the quantitative research questions. Qualitative data obtained from interviews with key informants was transcribed and divided into meaningful analytical units which were coded for content analysis. Findings show that there was a rapid adoption of social media among the candidates for the 2013 General Elections with Facebook diffusing more rapidly than Twitter. Relatively cheaper cost of social media use, familiarity with technology, and years of Internet use, were shown to significantly contribute to adoption decision. Though mobilization of voters may primarily be done offline, social media ought to be utilized together with other media to supplement campaigns in complementarity and mutual dependency, as the study demonstrates a situation in flux.
Siyasal iletişim belirli ideolojik amaçları hedef kitleye benimsetmeyi amaçlayan, siyasal karar alma süreçlerinde özellik-le seçmen kitleye yönelik tanıtım ve propaganda amaçlı bilgilerin yayılması sürecini ifade etmektedir. Siyasal iletişim sürecin-de çok çeşitli ve boyutlu yapılar devreye girmektedir. Siyasal iletişim sürecinde geleneksel kitle iletişim araçları olarak adlandırılan gazete, radyo ve televizyon etkin bir şekilde kullanılırken, son 20 yıla bakıldığında internet ve sosyal medya ağlarının siyasal iletişim sürecinde siyasi aktörler tarafından sıkça kullanıldığı görülmektedir.
Background
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, have a role in spreading anti-vaccine opinion and misinformation. Vaccines have been an important component of managing the COVID-19 pandemic, so content that discourages vaccination is generally seen as a concern to public health. However, not all negative information about vaccines is explicitly anti-vaccine, and some of it may be an important part of open communication between public health experts and the community.
Objective
This research aimed to determine the frequency of negative COVID-19 vaccine information on Twitter in the first 4 months of 2021.
Methods
We manually coded 7306 tweets sampled from a large sampling frame of tweets related to COVID-19 and vaccination collected in early 2021. We also coded the geographic location and mentions of specific vaccine producers. We compared the prevalence of anti-vaccine and negative vaccine information over time by author type, geography (United States, United Kingdom, and Canada), and vaccine developer.
Results
We found that 1.8% (131/7306) of tweets were anti-vaccine, but 21% (1533/7306) contained negative vaccine information. The media and government were common sources of negative vaccine information but not anti-vaccine content. Twitter users from the United States generated the plurality of negative vaccine information; however, Twitter users in the United Kingdom were more likely to generate negative vaccine information. Negative vaccine information related to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was the most common, particularly in March and April 2021.
Conclusions
Overall, the volume of explicit anti-vaccine content on Twitter was small, but negative vaccine information was relatively common and authored by a breadth of Twitter users (including government, medical, and media sources). Negative vaccine information should be distinguished from anti-vaccine content, and its presence on social media could be promoted as evidence of an effective communication system that is honest about the potential negative effects of vaccines while promoting the overall health benefits. However, this content could still contribute to vaccine hesitancy if it is not properly contextualized.
With the changes in societies and economies, new formats and packaging of educational products have been emerging as alternatives to the traditional degrees and certificates. Most of these offerings emerge outside higher education institutions and aim to alleviate the gap between the supply of skills and the needs of industries which had a big impact on the educational space. The authors studied approximately four hundred thousand tweets discussing educational offerings. They used a combination of topic modeling and network analysis to group topics into wider themes over the topic network. They also used word embeddings to measure semantic similarity of words related to specific educational packagings and further understand the discussion carried out on Twitter. The results of this study show how public opinion on Twitter discussed formal and non-formal educational offerings in ways that stress economic and professional advancement. Finally, the results from the word embeddings analysis revealed a need for common and clear taxonomy that differentiates between educational formats.
Komunikasi politik saat ini bukan hanya dilakukan oleh para elit politik kepada masyarakat tetapi juga dapat dilakukan oleh gabungan individu yang bergerak secara sukarela untuk kepentingan publik yang dinamakan relawan. Relawan politik biasanya hadir untuk bekerja secara sukarela dalam pemenangan suatu kandidat politik dalam pemilihan umum, ini juga termasuk dalam pemilihan gubernur. Oleh karena itu, penelitian ini bertujuan ingin mmendeksripsikan bagaimana strategi komunikasi politik yang dilakukan relawan Roemah Djoeang dalam pemenangan pasangan Anies-Sandi di Pemilihan Gubernur DKI Jakarta tahun 2017 . Penelitian menggunakan konsep komunikasi politik, penggunaan saluran komunikasi politik, serta relawan dalam komunikasi politik. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian adalah kualitatif dengan wawancara mendalam kepada tiga relawan Roemah Djoeang. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa relawan Roemah Djoeang memanfaatkan beberapa saluran komunikasi politik, seperti komunikasi organisasi sebagai komunikasi intertanal antar relawan, komunikasi massa sebagai saluran informasi khalayak luas mengenai kandidat pasangan, serta penggunaan media sosial untuk berkomunikasi pada khalayak sebagai calon pemilih. Ini berarti relawan memiliki peran penting dalam strategi komunikasi politik pemenangan pemilihan gubernur DKI Jakarta 2017.Keywords: Komunikasi Politik, Relawan, Pemilihan Gubernur
The past decade saw remarkable growth in the production of user-generated text data due to ever-increasing usage of social media. During the same time Twitter has become an indispensable communication tool for politicians. To explore this link, we examine what usage patterns reveal about users’ opinions on the issue of Brexit, these usage patterns consisting of tweet frequency and length, as well as the terms used and their length. We analyse 185,970 tweets from 576 twitter accounts, each account associated with a Member of the British Parliament (MP). We use regression analysis and sentiment analysis, namely Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), to investigate if there is a relationship between the features of text data and the characteristics of Twitter users. Whereas these methods have previously been applied to American two-party politics, the multiple parties of the British political landscape have led to previous studies using typological analysis (human classifiers) to identify tweets. We present a methodology that assigns a political value based on an MP’s voting record on a single issue (Brexit). We identify systematic yet subtle differences in the way the two sides of the debate use language, but also specific usage patterns that are common to both.
The growing popularity of social networks and their easy acceptance of new users have the unintended consequence of fostering an environment where anonymous users can act in malicious ways. Although these platforms have many incentives to prevent such occurrences, they have not been able to cope with the sheer volume of information that must be processed. Moreover, the tendency of attackers to rapidly change strategies in response to defensive measures also poses a challenge. Hence, research on issues related to user trustworthiness on social networks is gaining traction, with many interesting studies conducted in recent years. In this work, we aim to review the present state of this field and present an analysis of the studies published between 2012 and 2020 that attempt to address this problem using various methodologies. Some of the solutions discussed in the literature can be described as bot identification protocols, while others focus on anti-spam protection, recognition of fake news, or rating the truthfulness of user-generated content. Many of these solutions offer tangible benefits in various respects, however none of them are able to provide comprehensive all-around protection against all possible types of attacks. Monitoring this scientific field is thus a key task, and this review will hopefully lead to a better understanding of the concept of online user trustworthiness by highlighting recent works that deal with this issue.
With nearly all political candidates, officeholders, and organizations using the platform, Twitter has become an important venue for political communication and engagement. In particular, Twitter lowers the cost of entry for political activity, with the result that millions of people follow and interact with political elites online. However, most studies of the political uses of twitter focus on the substance and content of tweets themselves. In contrast, we ask what influences the rates at which users engage with the tweets posted by political elites. To do this, we obtained the number of likes and retweets for each of President Trump’s tweets over a 14-month time span. Using these data, we find first that engagement varies with Trump’s net approval in the broader electorate. Second, we find that engagement varies with the substantive content of the tweet: negatively toned tweets and tweets involving foreign policy receive higher levels of engagement than other tweets. Third, we find that high-salience events—for example, the recusal of Jeff Sessions—lead to more engagement. Fourth, we find some evidence that engagement levels vary with the timing of the electoral cycle. Overall, we argue that the factors influencing Twitter engagement are in some ways similar to the factors influencing political activity more broadly, though it is possible that the fact that Trump’s use of Twitter is unique among politicians drives some of our results.
The months-long anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong has gained worldwide attention. Grounded in the network agenda-setting (NAS) model, this study utilizes a machine-learning approach to analyze the related coverage of mainstream newspapers in Hong Kong, Mainland China, the U.S. and the U.K. (N = 2118), as well as discussions on Twitter (N = 152,509). Network visualizations showed that each media utilized a unique approach to highlight and connect the substantive and affective attributes. Time-series analyses revealed an overall reciprocal whilst asymmetrical association between the newspapers and Twitter, in which the latter exhibited a stronger influence on the former, particularly in terms of substantive attribute agendas. Yet, Twitter’s impact shrank in terms of the affective attribute agendas and the NAS models. Newspapers, though exerted rather limited impact on Twitter, maintained a certain extent of independence in setting their affective attribute agendas and NAS models. This study enriches the NAS literature through combining substantive and affective attributes in semantic networks.
This study seeks to answer to the question of whether new media innovate/replicate the existing pattern of political communication by looking into Korean politicians’ Twitter, relying on data collected at the early majority stage of its diffusion in the Korean Assembly. This study reveals politicians who represented an educated district and were prominent in traditional media were more likely to adopt Twitter. Opposition party members and representatives of a high-income constituency had more followers, as well as utilized Twitter more actively. While those who were experienced and prominent in legacy news media had more followers, those who represented an educated district had fewer followers. These findings suggest that, at the early majority stage of its diffusion among Korean politicians, while Twitter enhanced politicians’ chances to contact with voters, it reproduced the existing pattern of political communication in terms of political leverage. Twitter in Korean politics can be seen as both innovation and normalization rather than clearly one or the other.
Studies have demonstrated an increase in the use of strategy framing in coverage of
political campaigns over the years, and during campaign cycles. Despite increases in
politicians’ and voters’ use of social media, very little is known about the use of framing
in e-campaigns. This study examines Republican presidential candidates’ Twitter activity
during the 2016 primaries (more than 22,000 tweets). We find that only two candidates,
Donald Trump, and John Kasich, have followed the news media tendency to emphasize
strategy over issues. Also, candidates dedicated more than a third of their Twitter activity
to updating followers on events and the campaign. Using time-series analysis, we found
that the use of framing was dynamic over time, with issue framing increasing around
debates and strategy around voting days. This study contributes to our understanding of
the use of social media as a complementary and alternative method for direct
communication between candidates and their voters.
The literature identifies multiple motivations underlying individuals’ drive to share information on social media. We categorized these motivations using the psychological concept of needs that all humans have (i.e., need for impression management and enhancement, need for self-consistency and social identity, need for accuracy, and need for affiliation). Groups and individuals within a society may also have sociopolitical and economic motivations. Non-genuine actors are driven by their creators’ human motivations to share information. There may be individual differences in these motives, such that for some people, some of these motives are stronger than others. Individuals may also have different thresholds for sharing behavior, such that some share online more easily than others, based on how well they feel that information sharing on social media provides an outlet for these needs and how appropriate they feel their behavior is. These motivations are not mutually exclusive.
The research about the concept of influence on Twitter is still underdeveloped. This work is a theoretical and empirical approach on how politicians are engaging with citizens and/or journalists, and how these social conversations are framed under specific topics and users. The idea of new influentials on political communication in the new media ecosystem, as some studies found (Dang-Xuan et al, 2013), can offer empirical pursuit of the suggested ‘two-step flow model’ as applied to the agenda-setting process (Weimann et al., 2007) in the case of the microblogging for campaigning online. Following the recent research about how politicians try to reach their potential audience (Vaccari and Valeriani, 2013; 2013a), this paper analyses the social conversations on Twitter driven by politicians, the main topics in these political conversations and the kind of flows of communication (direct or indirect) between politicians, journalists and citizens. This research explores the differences and similarities about influence on Twitter during European elections in two countries with similar political and economic contexts: Portugal and Spain.
The Twittersphere is a digital spatiality wherein different layers of digital attributes come together to shape a monotonous mediated atmosphere in the form of tweets and retweets. The Twittersphere functions through four attributes (namely tweet, retweet, like, and direct messages), and each have their own specific domain of work to reflect the construction of political reality.
Twitter provides a useful tool for studying public conversations about climate change, an issue that crosses international boundaries and stirs political and scientific debate. This review presents what is currently known about the way climate change is discussed on Twitter, acknowledging advantages and limitations and suggesting future areas for study. As an accessible platform, Twitter allows public expression of opinions on climate change and provides data on how these fluctuate over different times and places. Moving forward, studies assessing climate views can be improved by better linking them to demographic and other data indicating the population that Twitter users represent. The open‐ended content of tweets provides additional information, such as which topics are associated with climate change and which terms are used to discuss it. Future studies can build on these results to capture a wider range of climate‐related discussion. Finally, researchers are using Twitter to understand who initiates and participates in climate change dialog and how, by categorizing users as different actors—such as politicians, celebrities, NGOs, or the general public. Future research could consider how effective these efforts are, and how Twitter activity translates to offline outcomes.
Online social networks (OSNs) are structures that help users to interact, exchange, and propagate new ideas. The identification of the influential users in OSNs is a significant process for accelerating the propagation of information that includes marketing applications or hindering the dissemination of unwanted contents, such as viruses, negative online behaviors, and rumors. This article presents a detailed survey of influential users’ identification algorithms and their performance evaluation approaches in OSNs. The survey covers recent techniques, applications, and open research issues on analysis of OSN connections for identification of influential users.
Peace processes are complex, protracted, and contentious involving significant bargaining and compromising among various societal and political stakeholders. In civil war terminations, it is pertinent to measure the pulse of the nation to ensure that the peace process is responsive to citizens' concerns. Social media yields tremendous power as a tool for dialogue, debate, organization, and mobilization, thereby adding more complexity to the peace process. Using Colombia's final peace agreement and national referendum as a case study, we investigate the influence of two important indicators: intergroup polarization and public sentiment toward the peace process. We present a detailed linguistic analysis to detect intergroup polarization and a predictive model that leverages Tweet structure, content, and user-based features to predict public sentiment toward the Colombian peace process. We demonstrate that had proaccord stakeholders leveraged public opinion from social media, the outcome of the Colombian referendum could have been different.
This contribution aims to demonstrate how Fuzzy Cognitive Maps can be applied as decision support tools in Smart Cities. Simulation as a scientific method represents simplified processes and systems for decision making. Simulating real world scenarios of Smart Mobility on a computer-controlled environment – using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps - allows drawing conclusions from considered alternatives for policy making. In this context Fuzzy Cognitive Maps can be used both as a knowledge and communication tool. Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in the framework of Smart Government indicates the need to first conceptualize the domains of Smart Cities. Smart Mobility is one of the dimensions in which ICT plays an important role and can be used to improve the interaction of cities with their citizens. Social media and open data can contribute to the interaction between government and the general public. The benefits and risks in terms of technological, contextual and institutional aspects need to be considered when using social media and open data to create Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. The possibility of integrating them into Fuzzy Cognitive Maps is described as a simple example of a Fuzzy Cognitive Map on urban mobility issues. Finally, arising suggestions from this example, how Fuzzy Cognitive Maps can be used as a decision support tool for Smart Cities, are given for further research.
Concerned by declining interest, trust, and participation by citizens in democratic politics, governments and political institutions worldwide are turning to the internet in attempts to revitalise democracy through online public consultation and citizen participation, referred to as e-democracy or ‘government 2.0’. This paper reports research into the planning and conduct of a series of online public consultation trials launched by the Australian federal government in late 2008, and it compares and contrasts Australian experiences with international e-democracy developments, including the Obama presidential campaign and findings of the Digital Dialogues review of online technologies to enhance citizen engagement in the UK, the UK Power of Information Task Force review, and experiments conducted as part of the MIT Deliberatorium. This paper presents qualitative analysis of findings in 10 areas, which it argues can be further grouped into four main areas of management focus of which technology, often the major topic of discussion, is important but less significant than policy, culture and resources.
Full Text is available at: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R41066
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model, representing most of the commercial world, versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
From the establishment of the United States Postal Service and the invention of the telegram, to the introduction of C-SPAN and the explosion of the Internet, the development of new communication technologies has always affected the functioning of Congress. Not surprisingly, recent innovations such as e-mail and social networking have spurred Congress to alter the way it operates as an institution, and rethink the manner in which it engages the public. In this brief examination, I discuss recent changes in congressional behavior and practices due to technological innovation, specifically the proliferation of social networking Web sites. Then, I cautiously predict future trends in the use of social networking and related technologies as they become more integrated in congressional offices and increase the capacity for more robust internal and constituent communications over time.
In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.
The recent emergence of online social media has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape, yet our understanding of this remains less than complete. This article adds to current understanding of the online engagement between politicians and the public by presenting the first quantitative analysis of the utilisation of the social network tool Twitter by Australian politicians. The analysis suggests that politicians are attempting to use Twitter for political engagement, though some are more successful in this than others. Politicians are noisier than Australians in general on Twitter, though this is due more to broadcasting than conversing. Those who use Twitter to converse appear to gain more political benefit from the platform than others. Though politicians cluster by party, a relatively 'small world' network is evident in the Australian political discussion on Twitter.
Studies of candidates’ and parties’ web use during elections have focused primarily on the contents of their websites and the reasons behind the adoption of the technology. Evaluations of the electoral impact of web campaigns on voters have been limited and inconclusive. This study uses data from the 2004 Australian Candidate and Election studies to investigate the factors determining candidates’ use of web campaigning and its effect on the vote. The findings show that enthusiasm for web campaigning is strangest among established party members. More significantly, we show that despite being linked with traditional campaigning techniques, web campaigning exerts an independent and significant impact on the level of electoral support that a candidate receives. We investigate how this effect may be taking place and conclude that web campaigning, at least under present electoral conditions, constitutes an important component of a winning election strategy.
Technology and the Future of Communicating with Congress, PS, political science & politics
- Blackberries
Blackberries, Twitter messages, and YouTube: Technology and the Future of Communicating with Congress, PS, political science & politics [1049-0965] Shogan yr:2010 vol:43 iss:2 pg:231 -233
The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtag Upends Australian Political Journalism
- J Posetti
Posetti, J. (2010) The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtag Upends
Australian Political Journalism. Mediashift -URL:
<http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/03/the-spill-effecttwitter-hashtag-upends-australian-political-journalism061.html>. Consulted 1 February 2011
Who's Driving Twitter's Popularity? Not Teens.. The New York Times — URL: <http://www.nytimes.com
- C C Miller
Miller, C. C. (25 Aug 2009) Who's Driving Twitter's
Popularity? Not Teens.. The New York Times — URL:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/technology/internet/2
6twitter.html?_ r=4>. Consulted 1 February 2011
Technology and the Future of Communicating with Congress, PS, political science & politics [1049-0965] Shogan yr
- Twitter Blackberries
Blackberries, Twitter messages, and YouTube: Technology
and the Future of Communicating with Congress, PS,
political science & politics [1049-0965] Shogan yr:2010
vol:43 iss:2 pg:231 -233
Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric
- J Porter
Porter, J. (2009) Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks:
Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric.. Bokardo -URL:
<http://bokardo.com/archives/relationship-symmetry-insocial-networks-why-facebook-will-go-fully-asymmetric/>.
Consulted 1 February 2011
E-Electioneering: Use of New Media in the 2007 Australian Federal Election. Paper presented to ANZCA08 Conference: Power and Place Wellington — URL: <http://pep.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Colleges
- J Macnamara
Macnamara, J. (2008) E-Electioneering: Use of New Media
in the 2007 Australian Federal Election. Paper presented to
ANZCA08 Conference: Power and Place Wellington —
URL:
<http://pep.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Colleges/College%20of
%20Business/Communication%20and%20Journalism/ANZC
A%202008/Refereed%20Papers/Macnamara_ANZCA
08.pdf>. Consulted 1 February 2011
The Internet and the 2008 Election. Pew Internet and American Life Project Report Pew Research Center
- L Rainie
- A Smith
Rainie, L. and Smith, A. (2008) The Internet and the 2008
Election. Pew Internet and American Life Project Report
Pew Research Center, Washington, DC — URL:
<http://www.pewinternet. org/Reports/2008/The-Internet-
and-the-2008-Election.aspx>. Consulted 1 February 2011
) Who's Driving Twitter's Popularity? Not Teens
- C C Miller
Miller, C. C. (25 Aug 2009) Who's Driving Twitter's
Popularity? Not Teens.. The New York Times -URL:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/technology/internet/2
6twitter.html?_ r=4>. Consulted 1 February 2011
The Internet and the 2008 Election
- L Rainie
- A Smith
Rainie, L. and Smith, A. (2008) The Internet and the 2008
Election. Pew Internet and American Life Project Report
Pew Research Center, Washington, DC -URL:
<http://www.pewinternet. org/Reports/2008/The-Internetand-the-2008-Election.aspx>. Consulted 1 February 2011