Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior

More and more people are getting their news from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumbler and many more, and candidates are using this to their advantage. This election is probably one of the first were candidates have actually used social media sites as their direct communication line to potential voters. Social media today had gone from gossip and family pictures to a location for political strategy. Thanks largely to trumps regular social media first declarations and its actually working particularly with the younger voters. A study released last year from the Pew Research Center that Marissa Lang cited showed that “Among 18- to 29-year-olds, nearly two-thirds said social media is the most helpful means of learning new things about politics.” (Lang, 2016). Even if the candidate isn’t the one posting the video or message in the end it will still end up on social media. For example, Trump had announced his plan to ban all Muslims from entering the united states in South Carolina not on social media however it found its way there and spread like wild fire. This sent those who were outraged to respond in disgust and those who encouraged it to share it so that their friends could see and so on and so on. Even if those who shared it did it to

Does Nicolas Carr, author of “How Social Media Is Ruining Politics” provide enough evidence that social media is ruining politics? The answer is a very obvious yes. Overtime, social media has slowly polarized the political perception of the American people. Social Networking is a new, popular medium that has changed the nature of political conversation. Therefore, it has become both a good thing and a bad thing. It has encouraged those who once did not partake in the political process to participate. Social networking is very useful to find out news and information ahead of the news media.. “It has become an easy way for political candidates to connect and communicate with the American people.” (Carr 1) While social media might provide the candidates with a form of convenience because it simplifies and speeds up the communication process, it also provides many ways for their campaigns to be easily and deliberately attacked. Unfortunately, what receives the most attention on social media is outrageous statements. Some candidates like Donald Trump know how to use this to their advantage. The danger in this is that candidates tend to use abrasive soundbites to grab the attention of the social media user. Unfortunately, the abrasive soundbites are often taken out the intended context. Other candidates like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush did not come to this realization as quickly because they did not want to take the chance of hindering their image. They understood that a

Although the 2016 presidential election was over one month ago, many people still can’t believe the surprise result. Behind being upset about the result, some populations start to think the role of social media during the election. They aware the power of social media is very strong. But at the same time, only a few of them realize that they live in filter bubbles.

These assumptions raised many questions to research as well. Moody, Cohen, and Fournon (2013) raised the first question of “What types of messages did candidates disseminate utilizing tweets during the 2011-12 Presidential Primaries” (p. 3). The next question brought up by Moody, Cohen, and Fournon (2013) was, “Were runner-up candidates more likely than front-runners to include a negative tone in their tweets” (p. 3). Then the third question stated by Moody, Cohen and Fournon (2013) was, “Were runner-up candidates more likely than front-runners to attack their opponents in their tweets” (p. 3) Finally, the fourth and final question raised by Moody, Cohen, and Fournon (2013) stated, “What interactive units did politicians use within their tweets. To what type of content did they link? What was the tone of candidate hashtags” (p. 3).

Many times I do not really pay attention to the presidential elections mainly because I myself had been too young in the past to vote. But this year is my year. I finally have a chance to have a hand in the decision of our nation’s leader. But this election has a different sort of edge. This edge being the effect of social media. Parts of rallies and debates are being broadcasted via social networks which are allowing people all over the world to have input on what is going on.

Throughout history, presidential candidates have capitalized to newspapers, radio, television and now social media to inform about the campaign proposals. In the middle of the Digital Age, social media platforms such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn performed an important role during the US presidential elections 2016.

“The data show that on twitter, political talk is highly partisan, where users’ clusters are characterized by homogenous views and are linked to information sources.” The more tweets on twitter, the more the content or information is likely to be one sided.

Any conflict exemplified within the media tends to have an impact of society. Whether it be an article or news story that affects someone’s political views, or a social media post that may change someone’s communal views. A small faction of people pushing to express a specific belief can go a long way, especially when utilizing the various number of media outlets the world possesses at its fingertips. So, what exactly did the social media users of this time have to say about the election? Donald trump is known for his constant appearance in the media for saying, or doing something that results in controversy. In the article, “Donald Trump BLASTS ‘“Black Lives Matter”’ Movement in a MAJOR WAY! BOOM” Kosar discusses Donald Trump’s reaction to Black Lives Matter movement protestors arriving to his rally. During the speech he was originally giving at his rally, he patronized fellow candidate, Bernie Sanders for allowing protesters to shut down his rally in Seattle Washington. He also went on to say that he would allow his supporters to fight for him if Black Lives Matter. If this does not sound like a bad candidate for presidency, then what is? His impulse reactions to conflicts serve as a bad character trait for a President to posses. The article also shows the protesters’ reaction to Donald Trump’s discourteous remarks. Twitter users took to the social media platform to notify the Black Lives Matter movement that Donald Trump is taking them lightly, and that they need to show

Social media played a vital role in 2008 U.S. President Elections. Using of Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, You tube was adapted by the political parties and influenced them to use social media in order to reach people effectively in U.S.

The last parliamentary election in Kuwait was held on July 28th of 2013. The call for candidates to declare their candidacy was announced 40 days earlier. WC represented 3% of the total candidates (8 out of 310). The Kuwaiti tweets posted over those 40 days were searched and retrieved using a Twitter search through the analytics engine of Topsy.com. This search engine stores all tweets posted since 2006. The names of the eight WC were the search keywords. We retrieved 1520 tweets, in addition to the tweets posted by the WC themselves, which were separated from the rest of the tweets. The majority of previous research which has analyzed sentiment towards political candidates on Twitter has selected particular pre-election periods as a time

In Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior, Sabastina Valenzuela (2013) investigated the link between the frequency of social media use and engaging in political protests. He argued that there has been an established positive correlation between social media use and civic engagement. Nevertheless, there has been no systematic explanation proposed to account for this relationship. In this article, the authors tried to test three different explanations connecting the frequency of social media use and civic engagement, measured in protest behavior.

In the past few years, the frequent use of social media changed not only on how individuals communicate but also how political campaigns are handled. The government and several politicians are highly dependable to this because it is a way in which they can communicate, argue and gather ideas of what the common people will say. The transformation of media has impacted the political campaigns of those who have been able to best exploit them. Social media optimization, the term used in which an individual uses social media outlets to acquire publicity of something. Basically, politicians are highly dependable to communicating sites to increase their awareness to the citizens. This is when politicians strategically disseminate information, communicate to gather ideas and respond to what may people sees them. However, social media optimization is likened to be a softcopy in which the public citizens tend to conceive a certain ad or posts that talk about accomplishments without apprehending if it is truly done in the community. So, social media optimization has pros and cons to both

. In 2010, Andranik et. al. [29 ] analyzed tweets which mentioned political parties and politician during German election 2009 and found that large number of tweets reflects voter preferences. Also, there are researches speculating the fact that Twitter can be used in areas like real-time event detection like earthquakes [30], tracking the spread of diseases [31].

In this essay, I want to assess the strengths and limitations of using the Internet for social research both as a tool and a source of data. More specifically, I want to investigate the use of data from Twitter as a predictor for voting outcomes, highlighting a recent case where Tumasjan et al. (2011) successfully predicted the outcome of the federal election of the national parliament in Germany in 2009 using more than 100.000 tweets.

After the election were held and the results were in the authors obtained the numbers to compare with their findings. Their findings “concluded that with regard to the total number of messages, exact reflections of the elections results were obtained” (Mengü et al., 2015). What this means is the candidate that ranked first, seconded, and so on in number of tweets showed though in the elections. This study shows us that analyzing Twitter with the right