Measuring the Influence of German Members of Parliament on Twitter: The Vanellus-Twitter-Index VaTI

Abstract

Vanellus (the peewit) is a twitter-bot developed by Christian “Chrilly” Donninger. The bot downloads in real-time all German tweets and stores them in a special-purpose and efficient database. The database can be searched and analyzed according a host of criterion. This article describes the Vanellus-Twitter-Index VaTI for the German MdBs (Mitglieder des Bundestages/Members of Parliament) and for the leaders of the Austrian parties. The VaTI measures the real Twitter-footprint of users. It is much more informative than usual the measure “number of followers”.