Science, Twitter and election campaigns: tracking #auspol in the Australian federal elections

Abstract

Social media is increasingly being used by science communicators, journalists and government agencies to engage in discourse with a range of publics. Despite a growing body of literature on Twitter use, the communication of science via Twitter is comparatively under explored. This paper examines the prominence of scientific issues in political debate occurring on Twitter during the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election campaigns. Hashtracking of the umbrella political hashtag auspol was used to capture tweets during the two campaign periods. The 2013 campaign was particularly relevant as a major issue for both parties was climate change mitigation, a controversial and partisan issue. Therefore, climate change discussion on Twitter during the 2013 election was used as a focal case study in this research. Subsamples of the 2013 data were used to identify public sentiment and major contributors to the online conversation, specifically seeking to see if scientific, governmental, media or ‘public' sources were the more dominant instigators. We compare the prominence of issues on Twitter to mainstream media polls over the two campaign periods and argue that the potential of Twitter as an effective public engagement tool for science, and for politicised scientific issues in particular, is not being realised.

The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries

“…Indeed, the literature describes Twitter both as a widely used platform and a source for climate change information‐exchanges which has become “too important now to ignore” (Veltri & Atanasova, , p. 724). Twitter's broad user‐base provides researchers with the opportunity to capture distinct, contradictory, and marginal views regarding climate change; a site where the different sides of a debate can be studied and that provide a continuous “picture of current public sentiment” (McKinnon, Semmens, Moon, Amarasekara, & Bolliet, , p. 2), for example, in the study of “climate skeptics” (Holmberg & Hellsten, ). Moreover, as Twitter is used in a large number of countries it may also serve to capture a diversity of cultural perspectives about climate change, including those “from the global south” (Bosch, , p. 45) and from countries which have attracted less scholarly attention.…”

One Day in the Life of a National Twittersphere

“…From now until the late evening hours, political hashtags were prominent: these included the well-established hashtag for generic political discussion, #auspol (cf. Highfield, 2013;McKinnon et al, 2016); #18c and #freedomofspeech for public debates about reducing prohibition against racial vilification in section 18c of Australia's Racial Discrimination Act, supposedly to strengthen Australians' right to "free speech" (McNamara, 2016); and #qt, widely used by journalists, political staffers and other "political junkies" (Coleman, 2003) to live-tweet Question Time debates in the Australian federal parliament. The latter was Figure 3.…”

Movilización y participación en Twitter. Estudio de caso del hashtag #SuperTuesday en las primarias presidenciales de EEUU 2016

“…Además, como señala Vargo -Twitter provides the opportunity to performone analysis covering both people and media‖. Actualmente, Twitter es una plataforma integrada en las estrategias de comunicación política (Bosch, 2017;Martínez-Rolán y Piñeiro-Otero, 2016;Rauchfleisch y Metag, 2016;Ruiz del Olmo y Bustos Díaz, 2016;Theocharis et al, 2016), en las campañas electorales (Jungherr y Schoen, 2016;Lemke y Chala, 2016;McKinnon et al, 2016;Penney, 2016) y, en el contexto de los Estados Unidos (Vargo et al, 2014), es un canal de comunicación e interacción con los simpatizantes de los partidos políticos y con la ciudadanía que utiliza esta red social como canal para obtener información y generar interacción con otros usuarios.…”

“…La unidad de análisis se concretó con estos criterios: contenidos publicados en Twitter en los cuales estuvieran presente el siguiente hashtag: #SuperTuesday. El uso del hashtag, como criterio de búsqueda, ha sido utilizado y contrastado en otras investigaciones (McAlister, 2016;McKinnon et al, 2016;Caleffi, 2015;Cozma y Chen, 2013;Papacharissi y de Fátima Oliveira, 2012). El autor del tuit que incorpora un hashtag tiene la intención http://www.revistalatinacs.org/072paper/1186/36es.html Página 684…”