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

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 primarily utilized newspapers and later radio and television to inform the public, the political arena has transformed into a more complex structure with the rise of the Internet and online social media. Now, more than ever, people express themselves online while mainstream news agencies attempt to utilize the power of the Internet to spread their articles as much as possible. To grasp the political coexistence of mainstream media and online social media, in this paper, we analyze these two sources of information in the context of the U.S. 2020 presidential election. In particular, we collected 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.