Visualizing Public Opinion in Croatia Based on Available Social Network Content

1. IntroductionAs demonstrated in some of our previous studies, social network services available online represent one of the best examples of globalization made real by the power of the Internet and provide us with new and unseen possibilities to study social phenomena (Schatten et al. 2015a; Schatten et al. 2015b; Ponjavic et al. 2010). Most certainly, leaders of this group of social network services, are those available publicly and are of most particular interest for social science studies. One such public social network system, which we chose for the analysis at hand, is the online microblogging service Twitter. This decision is based on several features of Twitter, including publicly available tweets (Twitter posts), an efficient and relatively easy data gathering process, as well as the quick nature and dynamics of Twitter (i.e. short posts of up to 140 characters, and streaming discussions about the presently relevant subjects). Undoubtful importance of Twitter in social activities performed on- or offline in the modern world is proved by the fact that on average 6.000 tweets are tweeted every second2. Furthermore, in only 7 years of its existence, the volume of tweets increased by six orders of magnitude, reaching a staggering number of 500.000. 000 tweets per day in 2013 (see Figure 1). Although not intensely popular in Croatia, Twitter can spur some serious debate in geographic Croatia as Brautovic demonstrates in his extensive analysis of anti-government protests in 2011 (Brautovic 2011; Brautovic 2012a, Brautovic 2012b). Nevertheless, analyses of Twitter in the Croatian blogosphere are very rare or non-existent.In the following we will try to fill this gap, and provide a current analysis of trends related to recent Croatian general elections. The main objective of this research is thus, to analyze the behaviour of Croatian people interested in politics that are skilled and interested enough to use the public space (especially Twitter) for expressing their opinion all in the context of the current political situation. We have gathered an extensive amount of social network data, that is analyzed herein.In the following we will try to answer some of the following questions: Does the tweet volume for each particular political party correspond with their respective voice count? What are the topics that are most used in the collected tweets? Can we gain insight into the concepts which Twitter users commonly connect with politics in the contemporary discourse? How interested are people to discuss politics or get engaged in politics-related subjects publicly? The rest of this article is organized as follows: firstly in Section 2 we provide a short outline of related research. In Section 3 the data selection and collection process is described along with data filtering values, and data analysis and results are presented in Section 4. The results are interpreted and discussed in Section 5. Section 6 concludes the research.2. Related ResearchTwitter and the content created by its users has been the subject of many published papers in the last decade. Meant for following trends, gaining access to large datasets, or predictive analyses, Twitter has often been viewed in the context of politics (Bekafigo 2013; Bermingham 2011; Brautovic 2011; Brautovic 2012a; Brautovic 2012b; Conover 2011; Dumitrica 2014; Groshek 2013; Tumasjan 2010; Park 2013; Sreekumar 2013; Tumasjan 2011; Younus 2011). Public opinion based solely on social networks has been in research focus as well, e.g. (Vesnic-Alujevic 2012; O'Connor 2010; Conroy 2012; Pak 2010). It has been argued that common tweets can present a researcher with valuable information when aggregated, albeit in the context of analyzing tweets about public health (Paul 2011). Since its beginning in 2006, Twitter was most prominently introduced into the world of politics in 2008, and 2012, during the U.S. presidential elections (Groshek 2013). Results of the elections, and those of Twitter data analysis suggest that online social networks can be used to predict public opinion, yet are different than usual polls. …