Social Media Monitoring of the Campaigns for the 2013 German Bundestag Elections on Facebook and Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes social media data from Facebook and Twitter related to the 2013 German Bundestag elections, providing insights into candidate activity, data collection methods, and potential research avenues.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive dataset of social media activity during the 2013 German elections, including data collection procedures and analysis of candidate engagement.

Findings

Identified 2,346 relevant candidates and their social media presence.

Collected approximately 469,000 Facebook posts and over eight million tweets.

Provided detailed data collection and archiving methodologies.

Abstract

As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elections, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parlia-ment [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of January 2009 to October 2013. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls containing approximately 469,000 posts. Twitter data was collected between June and December 2013 finishing with the constitution of the government. On Twitter we identified 1,009 candidates and 76 other agents, for example, journalists. We estimated the number of relevant tweets to exceed eight million for the period from July 27 to September 27 alone. In this document we summarize past research in the literature, discuss possibilities for research with our data set, explain the data collection procedures, and provide a description of the data and a discussion of issues for archiving and dissemination of social media data.