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...of character-level n-grams. To infer the partisan leanings of individual users we apply a machine-learning algorithm that leverages network and text features to make predictions of political ideology =-=[3]-=-. This technique relies on the highly-clustered structure and hashtag usage of a political retweet network. Using a data 1 code.google.com/p/chromium-compact-language-detector Figure 4: Interface one ...

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...mputer Applications]: Social and behavioral sciences—Psychology, Sociology ; H.1.2 [Information Systems]: Models and principles —User/machine Systems Keywords Popularity, politics, agent-based modeling, emotion 1. INTRODUCTION Online participatory media, such as social networking sites or discussion forums, play a key role in current political campaigns, and offer the chance to gather large datasets of voter expression and behavior. For example, the messages posted by thousands of Twitter users allowed the analysis of the differences in social interaction between parties in the U.S. elections [4, 5]. A common feature of traditional mass media and online participatory media is that both offer politicians a way to reach a very large numbers of users in very Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. PLEAD’12, November 2, 2012, M...

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... natural disaster, such as an earthquake. There is growing interest in analyzing political tweets in particular because of a number of applications such as determining political alignment of tweeters =-=[14, 10]-=-, identifying contentious issues and political opinions [20], detecting the amount of polarization in the electorate [11], and so on. There is even a body of work claiming that analyzing political twe...

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...uberman [34], in Kairam et al. [19]; notions of influence in Twitter by Cha et al. [6] and using Twitter predictive data for elections and discovering political alignment of users Conover et al. [8], =-=[9]-=-. In Asur et al. [2] authors studied trending topics/hashtags and discovered that the content of a tweet and retweeting activity rather than user attributes such as influence, number of followers and ...

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...ysthat analyzes and visualizes information diffusion on Twitter. Research performedson the data collected by this system covers a broad spectrum of social activities,sincluding political polarization =-=[5, 6]-=-, congressional elections [12, 7], protestsevents [8, 9], and the spread of misinformation [19, 20]. Truthy has also beensinstrumental in shedding light on communication dynamics such as user attentio...

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...he focus on hashtags reduced the risk of polluting the data by a large number of false positives (i.e. messages using politically relevant words or phrases, such as ”Angela” or ”Wahl”, that can also refer to topics outside of politics) and spam. To get a better, more structured understanding of the communication on Twitter, it helps to differentiate between messages that were posted in support of parties or candidates and messages posted in opposition to them. In the past some studies have used manually coded support vector machines (SVM) to identify the tonality of political Twitter messages [3]. For the purposes of this analysis, I propose a simpler approach enabled by a special feature of the German twitter-sphere. Starting in early 2009 the German communication consultant Sascha Lobo introduced the serviceWahlgetwitter . The website tracked the use of names of parties in combination with the suffixes + and - in hashtags. The name of a party followed by a plus-sign was meant to signal support of a party (e.g. #piraten+), while the name of a party followed by a minus-sign was meant to signal opposition to it (e.g. #piraten-). A website calculated and documented the total sums of pos...