Related papers: UK General Election 2017: a Twitter Analysis
The UK has had a volatile political environment for some years now, with Brexit and leadership crises marking the past five years. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the…
The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues. This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their…
The British party system is known for its discipline and cohesion, but it remains wedged on one issue: European integration. We offer a methodology using social network analysis that considers the individual interactions of MPs in the…
Online government petitions represent a new data-rich mode of political participation. This work examines the thus far understudied dynamics of sharing petitions on social media in order to garner signatures and, ultimately, a government…
The outcome of the British General Election to be held in just over one week's time is widely regarded as the most difficult in living memory to predict. Current polls suggest that the two main parties are neck and neck but that there will…
Analysis of information retrieved from microblogging services such as Twitter can provide valuable insight into public sentiment in a geographic region. This insight can be enriched by visualising information in its geographic context. Two…
In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and…
The Brexit referendum on the United Kingdom membership of the European Union took place on 23 June 2016. On the basis of a 52-48 split, statements such as: the majority of the UK chose to leave the EU, or the British people have voted to…
Measuring public opinion is a key focus during democratic elections, enabling candidates to gauge their popularity and alter their campaign strategies accordingly. Traditional survey polling remains the most popular estimation technique,…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
Electoral prediction from Twitter data is an appealing research topic. It seems relatively straightforward and the prevailing view is overly optimistic. This is problematic because while simple approaches are assumed to be good enough, core…
Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
Measuring and forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is a long-standing goal of big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can capture the…
We examine the relationship between social structure and sentiment through the analysis of a large collection of tweets about the Irish Marriage Referendum of 2015. We obtain the sentiment of every tweet with the hashtags #marref and…
This paper establishes an empirical baseline of public sentiment toward Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies across six European countries during the period 2006--2019, prior to the widespread adoption of generative AI systems.…
This paper studies the dynamics of opinion formation and polarization in social media. We investigate whether users' stance concerning contentious subjects is influenced by the online discussions they are exposed to and interactions with…
The advent of 4G increased the usage of internet in India, which took a huge number of discussions online. Online Social Networks (OSNs) are the center of these discussions. During elections, political discussions constitute a significant…
A desire to understand the decision of the UK to leave the European Union, Brexit, in the referendum of June 2016 has continued to occupy academics, the media and politicians. Using topological data analysis ball mapper we extract…
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…
Coordinated online behaviors are an essential part of information and influence operations, as they allow a more effective disinformation's spread. Most studies on coordinated behaviors involved manual investigations, and the few existing…