Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election

Hadi Abdine, Yanzhu Guo, Virgile Rennard, Michalis Vazirgiannis


Abstract
With the significant increase in users on social media platforms, a new means of political campaigning has appeared. Twitter and Facebook are now notable campaigning tools during elections. Indeed, the candidates and their parties now take to the internet to interact and spread their ideas. In this paper, we aim to identify political communities formed on Twitter during the 2022 French presidential election and analyze each respective community. We create a large-scale Twitter dataset containing 1.2 million users and 62.6 million tweets that mention keywords relevant to the election. We perform community detection on a retweet graph of users and propose an in-depth analysis of the stance of each community. Finally, we attempt to detect offensive tweets and automatic bots, comparing across communities in order to gain insight into each candidate’s supporter demographics and online campaign strategy.
Anthology ID:
2022.politicalnlp-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC 2022 workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Haithem Afli, Mehwish Alam, Houda Bouamor, Cristina Blasi Casagran, Colleen Boland, Sahar Ghannay
Venue:
PoliticalNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
62–71
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.politicalnlp-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hadi Abdine, Yanzhu Guo, Virgile Rennard, and Michalis Vazirgiannis. 2022. Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election. In Proceedings of the LREC 2022 workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences, pages 62–71, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election (Abdine et al., PoliticalNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.politicalnlp-1.9.pdf