Concerns have reached the mainstream about how social media are affecting political outcomes. One trajectory for this is the exposure of politicians to online abuse. In this paper we use 1.4 million tweets from the months before the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections to explore the abuse directed at politicians. This collection allows us to look at abuse broken down by both party and gender and aimed at specific Members of Parliament. It also allows us to investigate the characteristics of those who send abuse and their topics of interest. Results show that in both absolute and proportional terms, abuse increased substantially in 2017 compared with 2015. Abusive replies are somewhat less directed at women and those not in the currently governing party. Those who send the abuse may be issue-focused, or they may repeatedly target an individual. In the latter category, accounts are more likely to be throwaway. Those sending abuse have a wide range of topical triggers, including borders and terrorism.
Whilst online fora have attracted much attention as a way of exploring political dynamics @cite_15 @cite_4 @cite_8 @cite_12 @cite_16 @cite_13 , and the effect of abuse and incivility in these contexts has been explored @cite_7 @cite_19 @cite_3 @cite_2 , little work exists regarding the abusive and intimidating ways people address politicians online; a trend that has worrying implications for democracy. collected tweets centred around candidates for the European Parliament election in 2014 from Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and France posted in the month surrounding the election. They find that the extent of the abuse and harrassment a politician is subject to correlates with their engagement with the medium. Their analysis focuses on the way in which uncivil behaviour negatively impacts on the potential of the medium to increase interactivity and positively stimulate democracy. Stambolieva studies online abuse against female Members of Parliament (MPs) only; in studying male MPs as well, we are able to contrast the level of abuse they each receive. Furthermore, we contrast proportional with absolute figures, creating quite a different impression from the one she gives.
@cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_3 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_12
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Disengagement and disenchantment with the Parliamentary process is an important concern in today's Western democracies. Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK are therefore seeking new ways to engage with citizens, including being on digital platforms such as Twitter. In recent years, nearly all (579 out of 650) MPs have created Twitter accounts, and have amassed huge followings comparable to a sizable fraction of the country's population. This paper seeks to shed light on this phenomenon by examining the volume and nature of the interaction between MPs and citizens. We find that although there is an information overload on MPs, attention on individual MPs is focused during small time windows when something topical may be happening relating to them. MPs manage their interaction strategically, replying selectively to UK-based citizens and thereby serving in their role as elected representatives, and using retweets to spread their party's message. Most promisingly, we find that Twitter opens up new avenues with substantial volumes of cross-party interaction, between MPs of one party and citizens who support (follow) MPs of other parties. Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians’ main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians’ actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such activity is correlated with the election results. We introduce a new measure to study political sentiment in Twitter, which we call the relative support. We have also characterized user behavior by analyzing the structural and dynamical patterns of the complex networks emergent from the mention and retweet networks. Our results suggest that the collective attention is driven by a very small fraction of users. Furthermo... Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media. ABSTRACTAlthough conceptual efforts have often suggested that the Internet harbors considerable possibilities to revolutionize political participation, empirical studies have often presented rather limited impacts in this regard. Nevertheless, novel online services such as Twitter are still pointed to as having potential to be employed by citizens and politicians alike. Utilizing state-of-the-art data collection methods, this study builds on the suggestions of previous research and gauges the degree to which EU parliamentarians make use of Twitter for so-called permanent campaigning. Specifically, the paper seeks to assess the degree to which Twitter use by European Parliament representatives can be described as being characterized by permanence—a concept related to the professionalization of political campaigns. Thus, by examining these uses outside of election periods, the study provides useful insights into the day-to-day uses of Twitter, contributing to the limited body of work focusing on the everyda...