Can Social Media Engagement Predict Election Results? Bandwagon Effects of Tweets About US Senate Candidates

IF 5.5 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Social Media + Society Pub Date : 2024-11-21 DOI:10.1177/20563051241298449

Jinping Wang, S. Shyam Sundar, Nilàm Ram

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has grown to become an important venue for political discourse, with candidates using it integrally in their election campaigns. However, it is not clear if activity on Twitter can be used to forecast elections, given conflicting findings in the literature. By analyzing 830,796 tweets mentioning key hashtags related to nine US senate races in 2014, 2016, and 2018, we demonstrate that cascades in volume and sentiment of tweets between September 1 and Election Day can predict election outcomes. We developed a non-linear growth modeling tool to identify the point in time at which bandwagon support for competing candidates begins to diverge. We also discovered that bot-driven tweets play a negligible role. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for both computational research and media effects, showing the value of combining big-data analysis and longitudinal non-linear dynamics to study the relationship between social media activity and real-world outcomes.

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社交媒体参与能否预测选举结果？关于美国参议员候选人的推文的带头效应

社交媒体平台 X（前身为 Twitter）已发展成为政治讨论的重要场所，候选人在竞选活动中也经常使用该平台。然而，推特上的活动能否用来预测选举还不清楚，因为文献中的研究结果相互矛盾。通过分析 2014 年、2016 年和 2018 年与九场美国参议员竞选相关的 830,796 条提及关键标签的推文，我们证明了从 9 月 1 日到选举日之间推文数量和情绪的级联可以预测选举结果。我们开发了一种非线性增长建模工具，以确定竞争候选人的带状支持开始分化的时间点。我们还发现，僵尸推文的作用微乎其微。我们讨论了计算研究和媒体效应的理论和实践意义，展示了结合大数据分析和纵向非线性动力学研究社交媒体活动与现实世界结果之间关系的价值。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Social Media + Society COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

9.20

自引率

3.80%

发文量

111

审稿时长

12 weeks

期刊介绍： Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.