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Bumps and Bruises: Mining Presidential Campaign Announcements on Twitter
Conference proceeding

Bumps and Bruises: Mining Presidential Campaign Announcements on Twitter

Huyen Le, G.R Boynton, Yelena Mejova, Zubair Shafiq and Padmini Srinivasan
Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on hypertext and social media, pp.215-224
HT '17
07/04/2017
DOI: 10.1145/3078714.3078736

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Abstract

Online social media plays an increasingly significant role in shaping the political discourse during elections worldwide. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political campaigns strategically designed candidacy announcements on Twitter to produce a significant increase in online social media attention. We use large-scale online social media communications to study the factors of party, personality, and policy in the Twitter discourse following six major presidential campaign announcements for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We observe that all campaign announcements result in an instant bump in attention, with up to several orders of magnitude increase in tweets. However, we find that Twitter discourse as a result of this bump in attention has overwhelmingly negative sentiment. The bruising criticism, driven by crosstalk from Twitter users of opposite party affiliations, is organized by hashtags such as #NoMoreBushes and #WhyImNotVotingForHillary. We analyze how people take to Twitter to criticize specific personality traits and policy positions of presidential candidates.
sentiment analysis twitter social media analysis

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