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International Conference on Internet Science

INSCI 2017: Internet Science pp 132–147Cite as

Politicians Driving Online Discussions: Are Institutionalized Influencers Top Twitter Users?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10673))

Abstract

Embeddedness of politicians and political organizations in a discussion defines its level of institutionalization and creates a public arena for collaboration between publics and institutional actors. Thus, testing whether traditional hierarchies (in terms of presence of politically institutionalized actors) show up in online discussions deserves scholarly research. Moreover, it is also important to see whether more democratic societies show patterns of public involvement of politically institutionalized users that would differ from those in more authoritarian contexts.

To assess the ‘influencer’ status of politically institutionalized actors on Twitter cross-culturally, we have selected conflictual Twitter discussions in Germany, the USA, and Russia, all based on violent inter-ethnic clashes. Using vocabulary-based web crawling, we collected data on them and formed samples of top users selected by four activity metrics and five network metrics, to assess the positions of political users in the top lists and correlations of user status with their top list ranks. To this, we added qualitative assessment of presence of political users in comparative perspective.

Our results show that, in all the cases, presence of political actors in online discussions is scarce; also, political actors tend to fail to link user groups or stay in the center of discussion. There is also meaningful divergence of Russia from the pattern that Germany and the USA show: while in these countries politicians gain user attention based on content, in Russia it is the status itself that matters, and political users tend to gain weight in the discussion structure despite low attention levels.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported in full by Russian Science Foundation, research grant 16-18-10125.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya nab. 7-9, 199034, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Anna S. Smoliarova, Svetlana S. Bodrunova & Ivan S. Blekanov

Authors
  1. Anna S. Smoliarova
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  2. Svetlana S. Bodrunova
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  3. Ivan S. Blekanov
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna S. Smoliarova .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CERTH, Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Ioannis Kompatsiaris

  2. University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Jonathan Cave

  3. CERTH, Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Anna Satsiou

  4. Technical University Munich, Garching, Germany

    Georg Carle

  5. T6 Ecosystems, Rome, Italy

    Antonella Passani

  6. CERTH, Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Efstratios Kontopoulos

  7. CERTH, Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Sotiris Diplaris

  8. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Donald McMillan

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Smoliarova, A.S., Bodrunova, S.S., Blekanov, I.S. (2017). Politicians Driving Online Discussions: Are Institutionalized Influencers Top Twitter Users?. In: Kompatsiaris, I., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10673. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_11

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