The irruption of social media in the political sphere is generating repositories of “Big Data,” which can be mined to gain insights into communication dynamics. The research reported here relies on a large data set from Twitter to examine the activity, emotional content, and interactions of political parties and politicians during the campaign for the Spanish national elections in November 2011. The aim of this study is to investigate the adaptation of political parties to this new communication and organizational paradigm originating in the evolution of the Internet and online social networks. We analyze the reply and retweet networks of seven political parties with significant offline differences to assess their conversation and information diffusion patterns. We observe that political parties, and especially the major traditional parties, still tend to use Twitter just as a one‐way flow communication tool. Moreover, we find evidence of a balkanization trend in the Spanish online political sphere, as observed in previous research for other countries.

Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such phenomenon by analyzing the interactions of the ∼10 million users of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking service popular among teenagers. In dyadic relationships we find evidence of higher gender homophily for women. We also observe a preference of users with more friends to connect to the opposite gender. A particularly marked gender difference emerges in signing up for the social networking service and adding the first friends, and in the interactions by means of wall messages. In these contexts we find evidence of a strong homophily for women, and little or no homophily for men. By examining the gender composition of triangle motifs, we observe a marked tendency of users to group into gender homogeneous clusters, with a particularly high number of male-only triangles. We show that age plays an important role in this context, with a tendency to higher homophily for young teenagers in both dyadic and triadic relationships. Our findings have implications for addressing gender gap issues, understanding adolescent online behavior and technology adoption, and modeling social networks.

BackgroundIn their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media.Methodology/Principal FindingsContinued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display their political affiliation. Next, we analyzed the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.Conclusions/SignificanceOur results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.

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