Political issues that spread: Understanding retweet behavior during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Jeff Hemsley, Sam Jackson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present preliminary results from analysis of what topics presidential candidates tweeted about and the public’s response to those tweets in the form of retweets. Using exploratory data analysis and simple correlations to explore the 4,754 tweets posted by U.S. presidential candidates over the last 3 months of the 2016 Election, we find a mismatch between the topics that candidates tweet about the most and the topics that the public retweets the most. We discuss the possible reasons for the mismatch and outline future work that will include a similar analysis with Facebook data and a breakdown by party.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages305-309
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)9781450363341
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 18 2018
Event9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: Jul 18 2018Jul 20 2018

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Other

Other9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period7/18/187/20/18

Keywords

  • Elections
  • Political Issues
  • Social Media
  • Twitter
  • Virality

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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