By being embedded in everyday life, social networking sites (SNSs) have altered the way campaign politics are understood and engaged with by politicians and citizens alike. However, the actual content of social media has remained a vast but somewhat amorphous and understudied entity. The study reported here examines public sentiment as it was expressed in just over 1.42 million social media units on Facebook and Twitter to provide broad insights into dominant topics and themes that were prevalent in the 2012 U.S. election campaign online. Key findings include the fact that contrary to what one might expect, neither presidential candidate was framed in an overly critical manner in his opponent’s Facebook space nor on Twitter’s dedicated nonpartisan election page. Beyond this, similarities and divergences in sentiment across social media spaces are observed that allow for a better understanding of what is being communicated in political social media.

Social media are reputed to have played a crucial role in mobilizing citizens against autocratic governments in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. In Tunisia, digital activists successfully used social media to organize the popular protests that ousted President Ben Ali in January 2011. However, the phase of mobilizing protest to overthrow an established authority is different from constructing a political order to replace that authority. Hence the question arises: In what ways can social media contribute to democratic transitions beyond popular rebellion? This article focuses on the attitudinal factors that lie at the heart of cultural-behavioral approaches to democratization. A key element in the democratic consolidation of post-autocratic societies is the development of a participatory political culture, which, among other factors, depends on citizens’ perceived political efficacy. Using data obtained from a Web survey among 610 Tunisian Internet users, we test the degree to which respondents’ political use of the Internet during the Tunisian uprising influenced their levels of internal political efficacy and whether this shift in attitudes is positively related to measurable changes in electoral participation from authoritarian to post-authoritarian rule.

In a context of highly visible and politically influential populist movements, this study considers the online self-representation of the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) in the United States and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands. A multi-methodological approach was adopted to compare the discursive manifestation of key populism concepts: leadership characteristics, adversary definition and mobilizing information. Analyses reconstruct and account for similarities and differences in discursive framing strategies of ‘double differentiation’ through which both movements attempt inclusion in and exclusion from the political establishment, and, in doing so, mobilize communities of support. Altogether, this study advances the understanding of what constitutes ‘unmediated’ content that is presented through user-generated media production, and how self-determined media spaces have facilitated shifts in populist media legitimation and political representation in two politically unique countries.

This study explores the nature of how mobile social media may potentially be sharpening the tenor of communicating online. Specifically, randomized representative Twitter data were collected for several controversial issues, and then examined to determine the extent to which mobile or web-based content tends more toward greater incivility and impoliteness. Additional analyses further model how certain dialogic features, such as explicitly mentioning other users and retweeting others’ posts, positively relate to hostility in the discourse. Building on the basis of technological affordances and user negotiation in digitally mediated environments, this study contributes to a better understanding of how individuals express themselves on mobile devices as these are rapidly becoming normalized modes for communicating with one another online.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet

The methods summarized in this video tutorial series are based on the open source Digital Methods Initiative – Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) that allows media researchers to collect tweets off the STREAM API (application programming interface) on an ongoing basis. With DMI - TCAT and the open source data visualization software Gephi, social data in the millions of units is quickly and easily sorted by algorithms to find users or items of importance on Twitter, such as in the Fig. 1 below.