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Studying Politicians' Information Sharing on Social Media

Published: 08 March 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In this study, we pair different perspectives on information sharing held by the information behaviour and computational social science communities. By reflecting on different conceptual models of sharing (two-actor vs three-actor model) and applying methods from social network analysis and text mining, we investigate the influence that different user interface features (retweeting and quote retweeting) have on politicians' sharing behaviour during an election campaign on the social media platform Twitter. Amongst other results, our analyses show that the two features are used quite differently with the quote RT feature promoting non-partisan interaction, which leads to a more civilized discourse with opponents and support for colleagues.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHIIR '19: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
March 2019
463 pages
ISBN:9781450360258
DOI:10.1145/3295750
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 March 2019

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Author Tags

  1. computational social science
  2. information sharing
  3. politics
  4. retweeting
  5. social network analysis
  6. twitter

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  • (2020)Social Network Analysis as a Tool for Data Analysis and Visualization in Information Behaviour and Interactive Information Retrieval ResearchProceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3343413.3378018(477-480)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2020

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