Session | ||
C4: Political Communication and Social Media
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Presentations | ||
Mapping news sharing on Twitter: A bottom-up approach based on network embeddings 1Weizenbaum-Institut e.V., Germany; 2Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften, Germany; 3Sciences Po, médialab, Paris, France Relevance & Research Question We combine multiple data sources via state-of-the-art network embedding methods and automated text analysis: - we collected all tweets which contained a link to one of 26 legacy of alternative news outlets for March/2023 (2.5M tweets). Results Individual-level and party-level factors of German MPs’ general and migration-related political communication in parliament and on Facebook between 2013 and 2017 Hertie School, Germany Relevance & Research Question Facebook allows for direct communication with voters in the electorates. An issue that is divisive or polarizing on social media and political discourse is migration. This raises the guiding research question, of whether MPs who have positive or negative attitudes toward migration are more likely to speak in parliament on the issue or post about it on Facebook. This study compares the classical form of political speeches in parliament with social media communication on Facebook by members of parliament of the 18th German Bundestag (2013-2017). While prior studies compared political speech in parliamentary speeches and on social media focused on Twitter messages, this study uses a unique data set linking parliamentary speeches with election data, a candidate survey (GLES), and MPs’ social media communication on Facebook. The linked data allows to control for a number of candidate characteristics and test the influence of party or migration-attitudes on speaking and posting behaviour. The first part of the analysis examines factors associated with general political communication activity in parliament and on Facebook and deploys a generalized linear quasi-Poisson mode, whilst the second part identifies migration-related speeches and posting using a dictionary approach and also analyses the association with candidate characteristics in a quasi-Poisson model. Results The first part of the analysis finds that party differences and candidacy play a role in speech activity, whereas being from a ’left-centrist’ party (DIE LINKE, SPD, GRÜNE) is positively associated with the number of Facebook messages issued by MPs. The second part focuses on migration-related communication activity. Against the expectation that MPs with negative migration stances might have used Facebook more intensively to post about migration, the findings indicate that MPs who are in favour of migration were more likely to speak about migration-related issues in parliament and post about it on Facebook. |