Social Media Reputation and Political Popularity: Study of a Moroccan Case

Abstract

Popularity is one of the key reasons for the electoral success of a politician and his party. Discovering the reasons behind a political notoriety leads inevitably to the constitution of a stable and perennial political class. The present work seeks to measure, using a mixed method, the Facebook trust ratings of a political figure in Morocco, taking advantage of the huge amounts of information that big data are overflowing with, especially data arisen from social networking services, which have recently become a promising opportunity and an ingenious tool for extracting and exploring public opinion. This research has collected and examined 6 million of posts and comments about the head of Moroccan government in 2016. This study sought to identify the key reasons behind the Facebook popularity of this politician and his party. This contribution is intended to be multidisciplinary, both useful for policymakers, data mining experts and opinion analysts to explore public trends and inclinations.