Democracy in the time of social media: towards a standard approach

Abstract

Social network sites (SNS) play a role of paramount importance in the political landscape and influence the elections' outcomes around the world in an enormous way. As cases in point as for these phenomena, the world has witnessed the 2016 US presidential elections, the Brexit referendum, the yellow vests movement in France and the boycott campaign which took place in Morocco two years ago. In this vein, the citizens of all countries, especially the young ones, have been using social media to share and to get political information as well as to express their opinions, trends and contestations relating to economic, social and political issues as the habitual militating's ways are nowadays unable to make the citizen's expectations heard. The contents and networks structure of parties' candidates and politically engaged users have been used by many researchers to extract political insights that could help to understand the political events developments and to predict their results. Our contribution aims to explore the multiple techniques applied by the different approaches, examine their results in terms of accuracy and political insights and suggest a standard approach that will rely on the advantages of these contributions and standardize the processes of extracting and analyzing the political discourse which could help to decipher the enormous democracy's challenges raised by social media.