A Twitter-Based Analysis Of Hashtag And Mention Actions As An İndicator Of Turkish General Elections’ Outcomes
Abstract
Social media provides a large-scale data that have substantial prospective to define collective actions such as social trends, political participation and complex phenomena in real world. When people use these channels, they leave a huge amount of digital trace that can be easily reached by researchers. This digital trace bestows us a unique possibility to observe and reveal collective actions at unpreceded measures. In this research, we have aimed to test if the daily Twitter activities (tweet, retweet, mention) can serve as a significant indicator regarding Turkish election results, an argument already engaged in previous studies. We have concluded that some of our results overlap with previous studies. The correlation between the daily attention volume on acquired in this study and the election results –even though it does not directly impact the election results– shows Turkish Twitter data can be used as a proxy tool.
Keywords
Election,Political Participation,Attention,Social Media,Turkey
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