Twitter as a Political Network: Predicting the Following and Unfollowing Behavior of German Politicians

Abstract

It has widely been observed that many public figures and in particular politicians use Twitter as a medium for communication with their fans or followers. However, Twitter is also used by public figures for communication among themselves, allowing Twitter to be used as a tool to observe the social network among such public figures -- a network which is otherwise much more difficult to observe. Accordingly, we study in this paper the behavior of German politicians with respect to their social interconnections on Twitter, by way of asking the question whether the following and unfollowing between them can be predicted with accuracy. We show which measures are useful for predicting the formation and dissolution of social ties in the network of German politicians, and quantify the added value of unlinking information for both prediction tasks. Our results show that interesting differences exist in the factors that are related with the formation and dissolution of social ties.