When Politicians Talk About Politics: Identifying Political Tweets of Brazilian Congressmen

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to accurately classify Brazilian congressmen's tweets as political or non-political, revealing that over half of their messages are non-political, which has implications for political communication analysis.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel classification method for tweets that is independent of user and timing, applied to all active Brazilian congressmen over four years.

Findings

Over half of the tweets are non-political.

The method effectively distinguishes political from non-political content.

Analysis of tweets reveals patterns in political communication.

Abstract

Since June 2013, when Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation, a political crisis is in course. In midst of this crisis, Brazilian politicians use social media to communicate with the electorate in order to retain or to grow their political capital. The problem is that many controversial topics are in course and deputies may prefer to avoid such themes in their messages. To characterize this behavior, we propose a method to accurately identify political and non-political tweets independently of the deputy who posted it and of the time it was posted. Moreover, we collected tweets of all congressmen who were active on Twitter and worked in the Brazilian parliament from October 2013 to October 2017. To evaluate our method, we used word clouds and a topic model to identify the main political and non-political latent topics in parliamentarian tweets. Both results indicate that our proposal is able to accurately distinguish political from non-political tweets. Moreover, our analyses revealed a striking fact: more than half of the messages posted by Brazilian deputies are non-political.