Brenda Moon

Digital Dialogue? Australian Politicians' use of the Social Network Tool Twitter

The recent emergence of online social media has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape, yet our understanding of this remains less than complete. This article adds to current understanding of the online engagement between politicians and the public by presenting the first quantitative analysis of the utilisation of the social network tool Twitter by Australian politicians. The analysis suggests that politicians are attempting to use Twitter for political engagement, though some are more successful in this than others. Politicians are noisier than Australians in general on Twitter, though this is due more to broadcasting than conversing. Those who use Twitter to converse appear to gain more political benefit from the platform than others. Though politicians cluster by party, a relatively ‘small world’ network is evident in the Australian political discussion on Twitter.

Towards a typology of hashtag publics: a large-scale comparative study of user engagement across trending topics

ABSTRACT Twitter’s hashtag functionality is now used for a very wide variety of purposes, from covering crises and other breaking news events through gathering an instant community around shared media texts (such as sporting events and TV broadcasts) to signalling emotive states from amusement to despair. These divergent uses of the hashtag are increasingly recognised in the literature, with attention paid especially to the ability for hashtags to facilitate the creation of ad hoc or hashtag publics. A more comprehensive understanding of these different uses of hashtags has yet to be developed, however. Previous research has explored the potential for a systematic analysis of the quantitative metrics that could be generated from processing a series of hashtag datasets. Such research found, for example, that crisis-related hashtags exhibited a significantly larger incidence of retweets and tweets containing URLs than hashtags relating to televised events, and on this basis hypothesised that the information-seeking and -sharing behaviours of Twitter users in such different contexts were substantially divergent. This article updates such study and their methodology by examining the communicative metrics of a considerably larger and more diverse number of hashtag datasets, compiled over the past five years. This provides an opportunity both to confirm earlier findings, as well as to explore whether hashtag use practices may have shifted subsequently as Twitter’s userbase has developed further; it also enables the identification of further hashtag types beyond the “crisis” and “mainstream media event” types outlined to date. The article also explores the presence of such patterns beyond recognised hashtags, by incorporating an analysis of a number of keyword-based datasets. This large-scale, comparative approach contributes towards the establishment of a more comprehensive typology of hashtags and their publics, and the metrics it describes will also be able to be used to classify new hashtags emerging in the future. In turn, this may enable researchers to develop systems for automatically distinguishing newly trending topics into a number of event types, which may be useful for example for the automatic detection of acute crises and other breaking news events.

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the follower/followee network

Twitter is now a key platform for public communication between a diverse range of participants, but the overall shape of the communication network it provides remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed overview of the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere and identifies the thematic drivers of the key clusters within the network. We identify some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts and map the follower/followee connections between the 255,000 most connected accounts; we utilize community detection algorithms to identify the major clusters within this network and examine their account populations to identify their constitutive themes; we examine account creation dates and reconstruct a timeline for the Twitter adoption process among different communities; and we examine lifetime and recent tweeting patterns to determine the historically and currently most active clusters in the network. In combination, this offers the first rigorous and comprehensive study of the network structure of an entire national Twittersphere.

Identifying Bots in the Australian Twittersphere

Identification of bots on Twitter can be difficult, and successful approaches often use an iterative workflow, applying different techniques to identify discrete groups of bots. This paper presents first results of the application of this iterative workflow to the Australian TrISMA collection, which contains the tweets of over 4 million Twitter accounts identified as being Australian. To our knowledge, this research undertakes the first comprehensive identification of bots in the Australian Twittersphere. The identified bots are then classified by bot type before the proportion of overall account and tweet numbers they represent is determined.

Science, Twitter and election campaigns: tracking #auspol in the Australian federal elections

Social media is increasingly being used by science communicators, journalists and government agencies to engage in discourse with a range of publics. Despite a growing body of literature on Twitter use, the communication of science via Twitter is comparatively under explored. This paper examines the prominence of scientific issues in political debate occurring on Twitter during the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election campaigns. Hashtracking of the umbrella political hashtag auspol was used to capture tweets during the two campaign periods. The 2013 campaign was particularly relevant as a major issue for both parties was climate change mitigation, a controversial and partisan issue. Therefore, climate change discussion on Twitter during the 2013 election was used as a focal case study in this research. Subsamples of the 2013 data were used to identify public sentiment and major contributors to the online conversation, specifically seeking to see if scientific, governmental, media or ‘public’ sources were the more dominant instigators. We compare the prominence of issues on Twitter to mainstream media polls over the two campaign periods and argue that the potential of Twitter as an effective public engagement tool for science, and for politicised scientific issues in particular, is not being realised.

Much Ado About Nothing? The Use of Social Media in the New Digital Agenda Committee of the German Bundestag

More technical opportunities and also more communicative and participatory options online could lead to more political interest in general, and to closer interrelations between citizens and politicians. From the point of view of democratic theory, it is highly relevant whether citizens are vividly participating in politics or not. In light of recent political events it seems even more important to evaluate the positive and negative potential of online communication and its implications for democracy. For political purposes, Twitter is especially frequently used by professionals in election campaigns; to report, comment on, and discuss political events; or to stimulate political online protest. The chapter analyses social media activities of the Bundestag’s new Digital Agenda Committee. We argue that by using social media (and in particular Twitter) to report on its activities, the DAC can increase transparency and interactivity between representatives and citizens. This could increase and strengthen citizens’, journalists’, and other actors’ interest in parliamentary business. We collected Twitter data in 2015 to determine quantitatively for each member of the DAC their number of followers, the number of tweets they posted or retweeted, and how many retweets and @mentions they received themselves. Qualitatively, we further explored what information MPs tweeted about the DAC’s work, and how they informed the public about parliamentary business and their individual activities. For the purposes of this chapter, we focus our attention on the top-down direction of communication (from politicians to citizens), rather than on bottom-up responses (from citizens to politicians).

Detecting Twitter Bots That Share SoundCloud Tracks

Sharing platforms for creative content are often closely connected to general purpose social media platforms like Twitter. This also means that coordinated and automated mechanisms for promoting such content are likely to span both sites: spammers and bots operate across both platforms. This work-in-progress paper presents first results from an effort to develop activity metrics that enable the detection of Twitter bots promoting SoundCloud content.

Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns:

Against a backdrop of substantial and persistent disruption in Australian federal politics, this article examines the uses of Twitter in campaigning in the 2013 and 2016 federal elections. We comprehensively tracked the tweets posted by, and directed at, all candidates during the final 2 weeks of these campaigns, and compare patterns in candidate and audience activity across the two elections. This documents considerable shifts in campaigning strategies, electorate responses, and central themes of the debate from 2013 to 2016; we show that these shifts are in line with the changing electoral fortunes of Australia’s major party blocs during an exceptionally tumultuous period in federal politics.