Understanding How People Use Twitter During Election Debates

During televised election debates, it is now common for citizens to take to social media to express their own opinions. Within this paper, we present a thematic analysis of the tweets generated during a debate from the 2015 UK General Election. The aim of this work is to explore the visible online behaviour seen on Twitter. We argue that by exploring what types of tweets emerge regardless of their political affiliation, we will gain a deeper understanding of citizen’s behaviours online during live debates. We observed that citizens use Twitter to commentate along by sharing their opinions, experiences, make provocative or humorous statements, and interact and inform others.

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Author and article information

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Katerina Gorkovenko

Nick Taylor

Conference

Publication date: July 2017

Publication date (Print): July 2017

Pages: 1-6

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[0001]DJCAD

University of Dundee, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2017.88

SO-VID: 27f93965-7469-479c-b7c0-81a266146828

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of the 31st International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2017)

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 31

Conference location: Sunderland, UK

Conference date: 3 - 6 July 2017

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: digital make-believe, with delegates considering our expansive

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2017.88

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

reference

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J. AusserhoferA. Maireder 2013 National politics on Twitter: structures and topics of a networked public sphere Information, Communication and Society 16 3 291 314 http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.756050
T. Bakker 2013 Citizens as Political Participants: The Myth of the Active Online Audience? PhD Thesis University of Amsterdam http://doi.org/11245/1384371
BBC News 2015 How the internet reacted to the leaders’ debate Retrieved January 18 2016 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32174120
A BrunsJ. Burgess 2011 #Ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election Communication, Politics & Culture 44 2 37 56
M. Dathan 2015 TV leaders' debate: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’ Farage told as he lashes out at foreigners with HIV Retrieved August 13 2015 http://ind.pn/1Gln95u
K. GorkovenkoN. Taylor 2016 Politics at home: second screen behaviours and motivations during TV debates Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’16) 22 http://doi.org/10.1145/2971485.2971514
R. Holt 2013 Twitter in numbers Retrieved September 5 2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9945505/Twitter-in-numbers.html
D. Kreiss 2014 Seizing the moment: The presidential campaigns’ use of Twitter during the 2012 electoral cycle New Media & Society 18 8 http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814562445
J. MahoneyT. FeltwellO. AjuruchiS. Lawson 2016 Constructing the visual online political self: an analysis of Instagram Use by the Scottish Electorate Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16) 3339 3351 http://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858160
A. NandakumarJ. Murray 2014 Companion apps for long arc TV series: supporting new viewers in complex storyworlds with tightly synchronized context-sensitive annotations Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (TVX ’14) 3 10 http://doi.org/10.1145/2602299.2602317
N. NarasimhanV. Vasudevan 2012 Descrambling the social TV echo chamber In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science (MCSS ’12) 33 38 http://doi.org/10.1145/2307863.2307873
D. Patterson 2016 Twitter sentiment analysis finds two candidates have never been more controversial-or unpopular Retrieved January 10 2016 http://www.techrepublic.com/article/what-twitter-sentiment-analysis-is-saying-about-the-first-presidential-debate/
M. ProulxS. Shepatin 2012 Social TV: How Markets Can Reach and Engage Audiences by Connecting Television to the Web, Social Media and Mobile John Wiley & Sons. David A
B. SemaanH. FaucettS. RobertsonM. MaruyamaS. Douglas 2015 Designing political deliberation environments to support interactions in the public sphere Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15) 3167 3176 http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702403
S. SchirraH. SunF. Bentley 2014 Together alone: motivations for live-tweeting a television series. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14) 2441 2450 http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557070
D. ShammaL. KennedyE. Churchill 2009 Tweet the debates understanding community annotation of uncollected sources Proceedings of the First SIGMM Workshop on Social Media (WSM ’09) 3 10 http://doi.org/10.1145/1631144.1631148
N. TaylorK. Gorkovenko 2015 Tweets from #leadersdebate (2015 UK General Election TV Debates https://doi.org/10.15132/e0f2d122-f40f-449d-93b1-e58300ab1f3f
D. Trilling 2015 Two different debates? Investigating the relationship between a political debate on TV and simultaneous comments on Twitter Social Science Computer Review 33 3 259 276 http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439314537886
P. Walker 2015 General election 2015: the drama behind the leaders’ debates Retrieved August 12 2015 http://gu.com/p/46pph/sbl
H. WangD. CanA. KazemzadehF. BarS. Narayanan 2012 A system for real-time Twitter sentiment analysis of 2012 U.S. presidential election cycle In Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations (ACL '12) 115 120
X WangF. WeiX. LiuM. ZhouM. Zhang 2011 Topic sentiment analysis in twitter: a graph-based hashtag sentiment classification approach In Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management (CIKM '11) 1031 1040 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2063576.206372

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] N. AnsteadB. O’Loughlin 2011 The emerging viewertariat and BBC Question Time: television debate and real-time commenting online The International Journal of Press/Politics 16 4 440 462 http://doi.org/10.1177/1940161211415519

[2] J. AusserhoferA. Maireder 2013 National politics on Twitter: structures and topics of a networked public sphere Information, Communication and Society 16 3 291 314 http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.756050

[3] T. Bakker 2013 Citizens as Political Participants: The Myth of the Active Online Audience? PhD Thesis University of Amsterdam http://doi.org/11245/1384371

[4] BBC News 2015 How the internet reacted to the leaders’ debate Retrieved January 18 2016 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32174120

[5] A BrunsJ. Burgess 2011 #Ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election Communication, Politics & Culture 44 2 37 56

[6] M. Dathan 2015 TV leaders' debate: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’ Farage told as he lashes out at foreigners with HIV Retrieved August 13 2015 http://ind.pn/1Gln95u

[7] K. GorkovenkoN. Taylor 2016 Politics at home: second screen behaviours and motivations during TV debates Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’16) 22 http://doi.org/10.1145/2971485.2971514

[8] R. Holt 2013 Twitter in numbers Retrieved September 5 2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9945505/Twitter-in-numbers.html

[9] D. Kreiss 2014 Seizing the moment: The presidential campaigns’ use of Twitter during the 2012 electoral cycle New Media & Society 18 8 http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814562445

[10] J. MahoneyT. FeltwellO. AjuruchiS. Lawson 2016 Constructing the visual online political self: an analysis of Instagram Use by the Scottish Electorate Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16) 3339 3351 http://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858160

[11] A. NandakumarJ. Murray 2014 Companion apps for long arc TV series: supporting new viewers in complex storyworlds with tightly synchronized context-sensitive annotations Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (TVX ’14) 3 10 http://doi.org/10.1145/2602299.2602317

[12] N. NarasimhanV. Vasudevan 2012 Descrambling the social TV echo chamber In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science (MCSS ’12) 33 38 http://doi.org/10.1145/2307863.2307873

[13] D. Patterson 2016 Twitter sentiment analysis finds two candidates have never been more controversial-or unpopular Retrieved January 10 2016 http://www.techrepublic.com/article/what-twitter-sentiment-analysis-is-saying-about-the-first-presidential-debate/

[14] M. ProulxS. Shepatin 2012 Social TV: How Markets Can Reach and Engage Audiences by Connecting Television to the Web, Social Media and Mobile John Wiley & Sons. David A

[15] B. SemaanH. FaucettS. RobertsonM. MaruyamaS. Douglas 2015 Designing political deliberation environments to support interactions in the public sphere Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15) 3167 3176 http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702403

[16] S. SchirraH. SunF. Bentley 2014 Together alone: motivations for live-tweeting a television series. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14) 2441 2450 http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557070

[17] D. ShammaL. KennedyE. Churchill 2009 Tweet the debates understanding community annotation of uncollected sources Proceedings of the First SIGMM Workshop on Social Media (WSM ’09) 3 10 http://doi.org/10.1145/1631144.1631148

[18] N. TaylorK. Gorkovenko 2015 Tweets from #leadersdebate (2015 UK General Election TV Debates https://doi.org/10.15132/e0f2d122-f40f-449d-93b1-e58300ab1f3f

[19] D. Trilling 2015 Two different debates? Investigating the relationship between a political debate on TV and simultaneous comments on Twitter Social Science Computer Review 33 3 259 276 http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439314537886

[20] P. Walker 2015 General election 2015: the drama behind the leaders’ debates Retrieved August 12 2015 http://gu.com/p/46pph/sbl

[21] H. WangD. CanA. KazemzadehF. BarS. Narayanan 2012 A system for real-time Twitter sentiment analysis of 2012 U.S. presidential election cycle In Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations (ACL '12) 115 120

[22] X WangF. WeiX. LiuM. ZhouM. Zhang 2011 Topic sentiment analysis in twitter: a graph-based hashtag sentiment classification approach In Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management (CIKM '11) 1031 1040 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2063576.206372

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