TY - GEN

T1 - Politicians driving online discussions: Are institutionalized influencers top twitter users?

AU - Смолярова, Анна Сергеевна

AU - Бодрунова, Светлана Сергеевна

AU - Blekanov, Ivan S.

N1 - Conference code: 4

PY - 2017

Y1 - 2017

N2 - Embeddedness of politicians and political organizations in a discussion defines its level of institutionalization and creates a public arena for collaboration between publics and institutional actors. Thus, testing whether traditional hierarchies (in terms of presence of politically institutionalized actors) show up in online discussions deserves scholarly research. Moreover, it is also important to see whether more democratic societies show patterns of public involvement of politically institutionalized users that would differ from those in more authoritarian contexts. To assess the ‘influencer’ status of politically institutionalized actors on Twitter cross-culturally, we have selected conflictual Twitter discussions in Germany, the USA, and Russia, all based on violent inter-ethnic clashes. Using vocabulary-based web crawling, we collected data on them and formed samples of top users selected by four activity metrics and five network metrics, to assess the positions of political users in the top lists and correlations of user status with their top list ranks. To this, we added qualitative assessment of presence of political users in comparative perspective. Our results show that, in all the cases, presence of political actors in online discussions is scarce; also, political actors tend to fail to link user groups or stay in the center of discussion. There is also meaningful divergence of Russia from the pattern that Germany and the USA show: while in these countries politicians gain user attention based on content, in Russia it is the status itself that matters, and political users tend to gain weight in the discussion structure despite low attention levels.

AB - Embeddedness of politicians and political organizations in a discussion defines its level of institutionalization and creates a public arena for collaboration between publics and institutional actors. Thus, testing whether traditional hierarchies (in terms of presence of politically institutionalized actors) show up in online discussions deserves scholarly research. Moreover, it is also important to see whether more democratic societies show patterns of public involvement of politically institutionalized users that would differ from those in more authoritarian contexts. To assess the ‘influencer’ status of politically institutionalized actors on Twitter cross-culturally, we have selected conflictual Twitter discussions in Germany, the USA, and Russia, all based on violent inter-ethnic clashes. Using vocabulary-based web crawling, we collected data on them and formed samples of top users selected by four activity metrics and five network metrics, to assess the positions of political users in the top lists and correlations of user status with their top list ranks. To this, we added qualitative assessment of presence of political users in comparative perspective. Our results show that, in all the cases, presence of political actors in online discussions is scarce; also, political actors tend to fail to link user groups or stay in the center of discussion. There is also meaningful divergence of Russia from the pattern that Germany and the USA show: while in these countries politicians gain user attention based on content, in Russia it is the status itself that matters, and political users tend to gain weight in the discussion structure despite low attention levels.

KW - Influencers

KW - Political actors

KW - Twitter

KW - User metrics

KW - Web crawling

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85033567218&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_11

DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_11

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85033567218

SN - 9783319702834

VL - 10673 LNCS

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 132

EP - 147

BT - Internet Science - 4th International Conference, INSCI 2017, Proceedings

PB - Springer Nature

T2 - International Conference on Internet Science

Y2 - 21 November 2017 through 23 November 2017

ER -