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

Jeffrey Hemsley; Sam Jackson

doi:10.1145/3217804.3217934

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

Jeffrey Hemsley, Sam Jackson

School of Information Studies

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

3 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 language	English (US)
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	305-309
Number of pages	5
ISBN (Print)	9781450363341
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217934
State	Published - Jul 18 2018
Event	9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018 - Copenhagen, Denmark Duration: Jul 18 2018 → Jul 20 2018

Other

Other	9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018
Country/Territory	Denmark
City	Copenhagen
Period	7/18/18 → 7/20/18

Keywords

Elections
Political Issues
Social Media
Twitter
Virality

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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

Access to Document

10.1145/3217804.3217934

Cite this

Political issues that spread : Understanding retweet behavior during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. / Hemsley, Jeffrey; Jackson, Sam.

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, 2018. p. 305-309.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Hemsley, J & Jackson, S 2018, Political issues that spread: Understanding retweet behavior during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 305-309, 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark, 7/18/18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217934

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abstract = "We present preliminary results from analysis of what topics presidential candidates tweeted about and the public{\textquoteright}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.",

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

Abstract

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Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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