In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of the Twitter discussion on the 2016 Austrian presidential elections. In particular, we extracted and analyzed a data-set consisting of 343645 Twitter messages related to the 2016 Austrian presidential elections. Our analysis combines methods from network science, sentiment analysis, as well as bot detection. Among other things, we found that: a) the winner of the election (Alexander Van der Bellen) was considerably more popular and influential on Twitter than his opponent, b) the Twitter followers of Van der Bellen substantially participated in the spread of misinformation about him, c) there was a clear polarization in terms of the sentiments spread by Twitter followers of the two presidential candidates, d) the in-degree and out-degree distributions of the underlying communication network are heavy-tailed, and e) compared to other recent events, such as the 2016 Brexit referendum or the 2016 US presidential elections, only a very small number of bots participated in the Twitter discussion on the 2016 Austrian presidential election.
This paper draws on a larger study of the uses of Australian user-created content and online social networks to examine the relationships between professional journalists and highly engaged Australian users of political media within the wider media ecology, with a particular focus on Twitter. It uses an analysis of topic-based conversation networks using the #ausvotes hashtag on Twitter around the 2010 federal election to explore the key themes and issues addressed by this Twitter community during the campaign, and finds that Twitter users were largely commenting on the performance of mainstream media and politicians rather than engaging in direct political discussion. The often critical attitude of Twitter users towards the political establishment mirrors the approach of news and political bloggers to political actors, nearly a decade earlier, but the increasing adoption of Twitter as a communication tool by politicians, journalists, and everyday users alike makes a repetition of the polarisation experie... Social media is changing existing information behavior by giving users access to real-time online information channels without the constraints of time and space. Social media, therefore, has created an enormous data analysis challenge for scientists trying to keep pace with developments in their field. Most previous studies have adopted broad-brush approaches that typically result in limited analysis possibilities. To address this problem, we applied text-mining techniques to Twitter data related to the 2012 Korean presidential election. We use three primary techniques: topic modeling to track changes in topical trends, mention-direction-based user network analysis, and term co-occurrence retrieval for further content analysis. Our study reveals that Twitter could be a useful way to detect and trace the advent of and changes in social issues, while analyzing mention-based user networks could show different aspects of user behaviors.