Social Networks, Politics and Public Views: An Analysis of the Term “Macedonia” in Twitter

Abstract

In this paper we deal with Twitter and the presence of the keyword “Macedonia” in tweets over a period of time. We searched for the same term in three different languages, i.e. “Μακeδονiα”, “Macedonia” and “Македонска - Македониjа”, since we are primarily interested in views from Greece and FYROM without excluding views from other regions. We use methods from Social Network Analysis (SNA) in order to create networks of users, calculate some main network metrics, measure user importance and investigate the presence of possible fragmentations—communities among them. We furthermore proceed to a form of content analysis, using pairs of words within tweets, in order to obtain main ideas, trends and public views that circulated over the network.