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Road to the White House: Analyzing the Relations Between Mainstream and Social Media During the U.S. Presidential Primaries

Published: 29 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Information is crucial to the function of a democratic society where well-informed citizens can make rational political decisions. While in the past political entities primarily utilized newspapers and later radio and television to inform the public, the political arena has transformed into a more complex structure with the rise of the Internet and online social media. Now, more than ever, people express themselves online while mainstream news agencies attempt to utilize the power of the Internet to spread their articles as much as possible. To grasp the political coexistence of mainstream media and online social media, in this paper, we analyze these two sources of information in the context of the U.S. 2020 presidential election. In particular, we collected data during the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries pertaining to the candidates, and, by analyzing this data, we highlight similarities and differences between these two main types of sources, detect the potential impact they have on each other, and understand how this impact relationship can change over time.

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  1. Road to the White House: Analyzing the Relations Between Mainstream and Social Media During the U.S. Presidential Primaries

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HT '21: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    August 2021
    306 pages
    ISBN:9781450385510
    DOI:10.1145/3465336
    • General Chair:
    • Owen Conlan,
    • Program Chair:
    • Eelco Herder
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    Published: 29 August 2021

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    1. 2020 presidential election
    2. mainstream news
    3. news source correlation
    4. online social media

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    HT '21: 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    August 30 - September 2, 2021
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    • (2025)EDGE-UP: Enhanced Dynamic GNN Ensemble for Unfollow Prediction in Online Social NetworksSocial Networks Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_2(20-39)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2025
    • (2024)SentimentGPT: Leveraging GPT for Advancing Sentiment Analysis2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825350(7051-7060)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2024
    • (2023)An Analysis of the Dynamics of Ties on Twitter2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386839(5809-5817)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023

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