Election campaigning on social media: Politicians, audiences and the mediation of political communication on Facebook and Twitter

TL;DR

This study examines how German politicians used Facebook and Twitter during the 2013 election, revealing platform-specific communication patterns and differences from mass audience priorities through Bayesian language modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a human-interpretable Bayesian language model to analyze political topics and compares social media communication with mass audience interests in a real election context.

Findings

Politicians prioritize different topics on Facebook and Twitter.

Social media messages differ from mass audience interests.

Platforms serve different political communication purposes.

Abstract

Although considerable research has concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how politicians use different social media platforms in political communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign 2013, this article investigates whether election candidates address the topics most important to the mass audience and to which extent their communication is shaped by the characteristics of Facebook and Twitter. Based on open-ended responses from a representative survey conducted during the election campaign, we train a human-interpretable Bayesian language model to identify political topics. Applying the model to social media messages of candidates and their direct audiences, we find that both prioritize different topics than the mass audience. The analysis also shows that politicians use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. We relate the various findings to the mediation of political communication on social media induced by the particular characteristics of audiences and sociotechnical environments.