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Analysis of Twitter Communication During the 2017 German Federal Election

Authors:
Marek Opuszko
Laura Bode
Stephan Ulbricht

Keywords: social media, Twitter, sentiment, elections

Abstract:
Even before 2016 elected US president Donald Trump made the microblogging service Twitter a tool for political campaigning and broadcasting, the online service with millions of users gained attention in public events, scandals or sport events. The question still remains open to what extend the analysis of Twitter communication reveals insights into to political discurse during elections. This study uses the context of the 2017 German federal election to investigate the political communication within the Twitter network during 10 weeks leading to the election in September 2017. Almost 1,500,000 million tweets are analyzed using three different lexica: SentiWS, Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) and German Political Sentiment Dictionary (GPSD). In order to gain deeper insights, the users producing the tweets are investigated. We find that user strongly differ in their activity on the network and perform statistical tests to evaluate differences among the user groups.

Pages: 33 to 38

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: November 18, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4464

ISBN: 978-1-61208-681-1

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from November 18, 2018 to November 22, 2018