Studying Politicians' Information Sharing on Social Media

Abstract

In this study, we pair different perspectives on information sharing held by the information behaviour and computational social science communities. By reflecting on different conceptual models of sharing (two-actor vs three-actor model) and applying methods from social network analysis and text mining, we investigate the influence that different user interface features (retweeting and quote retweeting) have on politicians' sharing behaviour during an election campaign on the social media platform Twitter. Amongst other results, our analyses show that the two features are used quite differently with the quote RT feature promoting non-partisan interaction, which leads to a more civilized discourse with opponents and support for colleagues.