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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the interplay between mainstream and social media during the 2020 U.S. Democratic primaries, revealing their similarities, differences, and mutual influences over time using data analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of mainstream and social media, incorporating Google Trends and polling data to understand their impact during the election cycle.

Findings

Identified key similarities and differences between media types.

Detected evolving influence patterns over time.

Highlighted the role of online social media in shaping political discourse.

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 were primarily utilizing newspaper and later television to inform the public, with the rise of the Internet and online social media, the political arena has transformed into a more complex structure. Now, more than ever, people express themselves online while mainstream news agencies attempt to seize the power of the Internet to spread their agenda. To grasp the political coexistence of mainstream media and online social media, in this paper, we perform an analysis between these two sources of information in the context of the U.S. 2020 presidential election. In particular, we collect 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. To supplement these two main sources and to establish a baseline, we also include Google Trends search results and Polling results for each of the candidates that are being analyzed.