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Who Are the Most Followed Following? A Data Analysis Case Study of the Accounts the Top Media Directors from Spain Started Following on Twitter

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Information Technology and Systems (ICITS 2021)

Abstract

Social media is transforming Journalism, fading the traditional media and political information access monopoly. In order to discern the new dynamics among Media Directors in relation to other influence groups such as politicians, media and the Citizenship, we searched for patterns via a Machine Learning software to explore big data we then analyzed using data visualization methods. The accounts each user follows on Twitter play a fundamental role in the content to which they will be exposed. Reason why we analyzed who the top 50 followed Spanish Media Directors started following on Twitter from 2017 to 2019 and categorized the accounts in Types of accounts, Institution/Citizenship, Country, Number of followers and Gender. The results of this study show that the most followed Media Directors from Spain started following a majority of Spanish journalists and politicians, despite the fact that the Citizenship is thought to have acquired a more relevant role in the informational process due to digital platforms. On the other hand, results also indicate that Medium-Influencers are the trend among Media Directors, who also present a gender-balanced pattern regarding the accounts they began to follow.

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Acknowledgment

This paper is part of the project “Influencers in political communication in Spain. Analysis of the relatioships among 2.0 opinion leaders, media, parties, institutions, and audiences in the digital environment” (R&D-CS02017–88620-P).

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Correspondence to Veronica Israel-Turim .

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Israel-Turim, V., Micó-Sanz, JL. (2021). Who Are the Most Followed Following? A Data Analysis Case Study of the Accounts the Top Media Directors from Spain Started Following on Twitter. In: Rocha, Á., Ferrás, C., López-López, P.C., Guarda, T. (eds) Information Technology and Systems. ICITS 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68418-1_22

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