<table><thead><tr><td>Nom du parti</td><td>Nombre de tweets</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Parti Pirate</td><td>5536</td></tr><tr><td>Nous Citoyens</td><td>5280</td></tr><tr><td>Front de Gauche</td><td>4242</td></tr><tr><td>Nouvelle Donne</td><td>4065</td></tr><tr><td>FN</td><td>3381</td></tr><tr><td>Parti Européen</td><td>2634</td></tr></tbody></table>

Les résultats montrent qu'EELV (Europe Écologie Les Verts) a été le parti le plus actif avec 9725 tweets durant cette période. Les listes rassemblant l'UDI et le Modem ont des données sensiblement équivalentes. Plus globalement, dans les dix premiers résultats de ce tableau, nous retrouvons les partis majeurs de la vie politique en France, mais également des formations moins connues qui ont su saisir le scrutin et la puissance du canal de communication pour étendre leur notoriété. C'est notamment le cas de « Nous Citoyens », de « Nouvelle Donne » ou encore du « Parti Pirate ».

Concernant les deux « leaders » du tableau, nous avons corrélaté nos résultats avec la « vie des partis ». Cette nécessaire contextualisation de l'environnement permet de mieux analyser la plasticité des frontières entre vie réelle et présence virtuelle. Concernant EELV, la forte mobilisation sur *Twitter* peut s'expliquer comme une réaction à une situation délicate pour le parti écologiste<fnref n="104" />. En effet, le mois précédent cette élection, de fortes divergences ont miné les rapports entre les chefs de file du parti où s'opposaient alors une ligne portée par Cécile Duflot (qui a quitté ses fonctions de ministre et recherche une autonomie par rapport au PS) et une autre défendue par Jean Vincent Placé, partisan du maintien du lien avec le parti vainqueur des élections présidentielles de 2012. Twitter a servi de chambre d'écho et de sphère d'interaction et de débat.

Concernant l'UDI-Modem, une explication résulte de la naissance récente (novembre 2013) de l'alliance entre les deux partis représentés par François Bayrou (Modem) et Jean-Louis Borloo (UDI). L'objectif clairement affiché était de mettre en œuvre un partenariat politique pour les Européennes de 2014 devant

<footnote n="104">104 Desmoulières, R. B. (2014, June 14). Les chemins de Duflot et Placé se séparent. *Le Monde.fr*. Consulté le 15 octobre 2015, URL : http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2014/06/14/les-chemins-de-duflot-et-place-se-separent_4438226_823448.html</footnote>
se poursuivre pour les Régionales, voire les échéances nationales<fnref n="105" />. Ainsi, la forte participation sur Twitter peut s'expliquer, par la recherche d'une reconnaissance en tant que formation politique majeure en regard de l'expérience des deux formations sur la scène politique nationale.

Concernant l'usage des tweets par les partis, le graphique suivant représente le pourcentage de tweets publiés par chacun des dix partis observés durant la période d'observation.

<figure><img src="image_41.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.1 – Nombre de tweets par parti</figcaption></figure>

Au travers de cette illustration, nous pouvons constater que deux partis se détachent dans la fréquence d'usage, EELV et l'UDI-Modem. Les partis traditionnels de la vie politique française (PS et UMP) suivent ce duo dans une proportion équivalente. Ces deux partis disposent d'une organisation et d'une structure établie et ont été parmi les premiers à s'engager sur les réseaux sociaux, à l'image de la campagne de Ségolène Royal en 2007. Puis, nous pouvons voir que le Parti Pirate, jeune mouvement politique (fondé en 2009) reposant en large partie sur

<footnote n="105">105 Borloo et Bayrou alliés dans L'Alternative. (2013, November 5). Consulté le 15 octobre 2015 : http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2013/11/05/01002-20131105ARTFIG00597-borloo-et-bayrou-allies-dans-l-alternative.php</footnote>
les problématiques soulevées à la suite du développement d'Internet, arrive en cinquième position. Ensuite, viennent d'autres formations, dont deux fondées en 2013 et issues de différents débats à gauche et à droite de l'échiquier politique que sont Nouvelle Donne et Nous Citoyens. Concernant ces trois derniers partis (Parti Pirate, Nouvelle Donne et Nous Citoyens), nous supposons qu'ils ont saisi l'opportunité d'une prise de parole dans l'espace public que constituent les dispositifs sociotechniques. Les partis plus importants et traditionnels ayant eux un accès plus aisé aux grands médias, dont la télévision, pour faire entendre leur voix et servir de mégaphone.

Enfin, il est intéressant d'observer que le Front National a publié près de trois fois moins de tweets que les partis les plus actifs. Pourtant, celui-ci, nous le saisons à présent, a réalisé un excellent résultat électoral. De facto, la seule présence ou l'usage intensif d'un dispositif comme Twitter ne suffit pas à remporter des élections.

## (ii) Partis ayant fait le plus de retweets

Au travers de cette requête, nous avons cherché à quantifier le nombre de RT réalisé par les comptes des différents partis présents à l'élection. D'une certaine façon, nous avons ici interrogé les usages des partis. En effet, l'utilisation d'un RT est tributaire d'une certaine maîtrise des codes et normes en vigueur sur le dispositif et démontre également une certaine forme d'appropriation du dispositif.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-3 – Extrait : Nombre de retweets par parti</caption><thead><tr><td>Nom du parti</td><td>Nombre de retweets (RT)</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>EELV</td><td>9720</td></tr><tr><td>UDI-MODEM</td><td>9330</td></tr><tr><td>UMP</td><td>6981</td></tr><tr><td>PS - PRG</td><td>6679</td></tr><tr><td>Parti Pirate</td><td>5528</td></tr><tr><td>Nous Citoyens</td><td>5272</td></tr><tr><td>Front de Gauche</td><td>4239</td></tr><tr><td>Nouvelle Donne</td><td>4056</td></tr><tr><td>FN</td><td>3381</td></tr><tr><td>Parti Européen</td><td>2634</td></tr></tbody></table>
Les résultats montrent qu’à l’image des requêtes sur le nombre de tweets, c’est le parti EELV qui a été le plus actif dans les RT, suivi par l’UDI-Modem. L’UMP et l’alliance PS –PRG se partageant la troisième place avec sensiblement le même nombre de RT.

L’élément intéressant dans cette observation est le constat que nous avons pu faire en comparant le nombre de tweets (voir le tableau 1) et de RT. Nous observons qu’une grande partie des tweets émis par chaque parti sont en réalité des RT. Ceci est d’autant plus visible lorsque l’on compare les tweets et les RT du compte officiel du Front National et du Parti Européen, car le nombre de chacun d’entre eux est identique.

En complément de notre analyse, le graphique suivant illustre les proportions du nombre de RT de chaque parti au cours la période observée.

<figure><img src="image_42.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.2 – Répartition des retweets sur les 10 premiers partis du corpus</figcaption></figure>

Au travers de ce graphique, nous constatons que la répartition des formations politiques est identique à celle précédemment présentée concernant le nombre de tweets. De la même manière, les proportions d'utilisation de RT correspondent également. La différence entre le nombre total de tweets et de RT étant proche, cela explique que les proportions ne changent pas.
Ainsi, les comptes officiels des partis sur Twitter serviraient principalement à soutenir les publications de leurs candidats. Nous supposons qu'ils agissent comme des comptes servant à fédérer les utilisateurs/citoyens afin de leur permettre de retrouver les comptes des candidats qu'ils ne suivent pas forcément et, comme nous l'avons indiqué précédemment, de servir de relais afin de faire écho aux messages de leurs candidats.

### (iii) Hashtags les plus utilisés par les partis

Cette requête vise à connaître le nombre de hashtags que les partis représentés ont utilisés durant la collecte de tweets. Ainsi, nous nous sommes intéressés à une intégration plus générale de Twitter comme élément incontournable de la communication politique en fonction de la valeur ajoutée que peut constituer l'ajout d'un hashtag dans la publication d'un tweet.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-4 – Extrait : Popularité des hashtags par parti</caption><thead><tr><td>Nom du parti</td><td>Hashtag le plus utilisé</td><td>Nombre d'occurrences du hashtag</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>EELV</td><td>#ee2014</td><td>3403</td></tr><tr><td>PS - PRG</td><td>#notreeurope</td><td>1990</td></tr><tr><td>EELV</td><td>#eelv</td><td>1488</td></tr><tr><td>UDI-MODEM</td><td>#ep2014</td><td>1271</td></tr><tr><td>Nouvelle Donne</td><td>#reprendrelamain</td><td>1090</td></tr><tr><td>Nous citoyens</td><td>#ee2014</td><td>1020</td></tr><tr><td>PS - PRG</td><td>#ep2014</td><td>944</td></tr><tr><td>UDI-MODEM</td><td>#leseuropeens</td><td>933</td></tr><tr><td>UMP</td><td>#ump</td><td>743</td></tr><tr><td>UMP</td><td>#europeennes2014</td><td>743</td></tr></tbody></table>

Le tableau *supra*, nous indique que le hashtag le plus utilisé par le parti EELV est « ee2014 » (3403 fois au cours de l'observation). Ce même parti se retrouve également en troisième position avec le hashtag de la formation « eelv », utilisé 1488 fois.

On constate que les principales formations politiques ont utilisé plusieurs hashtags durant notre période d'observation, c'est le cas pour le PS-PRG, l'UMP et l'UDI-Modem, qui trustent ainsi les premières places du nombre de placements
de hashtags dans leurs tweets. Nous pouvons également voir comment des formations moins importantes de prime abord ont su efficacement utiliser cet outil offert par le dispositif pour accroître leur visibilité sur Twitter. C'est le cas pour Nouvelle Donne et Nous Citoyens.

## 8.3 Les résultats concernant les candidats

### (i) Candidats les plus actifs sur Twitter

À la suite de ces premiers résultats, nous avons recentré notre attention sur les candidats. La requête suivante a consisté à mettre en lumière la participation effective de chacun des candidats observés. Nous avons extrait le nombre exact de tweets postés par chaque candidat dans l'objectif d'établir une hiérarchie dans la présence et la participation de chacun d'entre eux. Cela nous a permis de répondre à la question : quel compte de candidats est le plus actif durant la période observée ? Et donc, quel est celui qui a le plus tweeté ? Nous avons ainsi obtenu un classement complet de la participation des candidats dont les dix plus importants sont présentés dans le tableau suivant.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-5 – Extrait : Nombre de tweets envoyés par chaque candidat</caption><thead><tr><td>Identifiant du candidat</td><td>Nombre de tweets</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Louisdegouyon (Parti Européen)</td><td>2028</td></tr><tr><td>Jsherpin (EELV)</td><td>1827</td></tr><tr><td>Bdelgendre (Nous Citoyens)</td><td>1823</td></tr><tr><td>Relf_PP (Parti Pirate)</td><td>1270</td></tr><tr><td>M_GHISALBERTI (UMP)</td><td>941</td></tr><tr><td>JoelRoman75 (EELV)</td><td>926</td></tr><tr><td>Nrosenberg (Parti Pirate)</td><td>898</td></tr><tr><td>JulienAyoun (UDI-Modem)</td><td>864</td></tr><tr><td>DominiqueRiquet (UDI-Modem)</td><td>848</td></tr><tr><td>JB_COUTELIS (Nouvelle Donne)</td><td>833</td></tr></tbody></table>

On observe que c'est Louis de Gouyon Matignon, candidat de 23 ans, président du parti européen et considéré comme le porte-parole des gens du voyage qui a émis le plus de tweets, soit 2028 tweets durant la période observée. Notons que
cet utilisateur est également tête de liste d'une formation présentant une unique liste en Ile-de-France.

Le second est Jean Sébastien Herpin, candidat de 45 ans, ingénieur en informatique et membre d'EELV, se définissant lui-même comme un « geek »<fnref n="106" /> et candidat dans sur la liste de Clarisse Heusquin dans la circonscription Massif Central-Centre.

Béatrice Delgendre, candidate de 46 ans, de la formation Nous Citoyens, placée 17ème sur la liste conduite par Isabelle Bordry en Ile-de-France est la troisième candidate ayant le plus tweeté durant cette période. Ainsi, si nous considérons brièvement les trois candidats ayant le plus tweeté au cours de cette période, on constate qu'il existe différents profils d'utilisateurs. Ceci ne nous permet pas de typologiser un profil type d'utilisateur. Il apparaît, cependant, une caractéristique commune, qui est que ceux qui ont le plus tweeté ne sont pas des « personnalisés » à forte notoriété et plutôt de générations acculturées au numérique et aux réseaux sociaux.

C'est pour cette raison, que nous nous sommes ensuite concentrés sur la participation des têtes de liste dans l'objectif de connaître leur place dans la liste des candidats ayant le plus tweeté au cours de la période. Le tableau ci-dessous présente les résultats que nous avons obtenus pour les dix premières têtes de liste.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-6 – Nombre de tweets envoyés par les dix candidats têtes de liste les plus actifs</caption><thead><tr><td>Identifiant du candidat</td><td>Nombre de tweets</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>christineboutin (Force Vie)</td><td>703</td></tr><tr><td>Corinnelepage (Europe Citoyenne)</td><td>637</td></tr><tr><td>Josebove (EELV)</td><td>424</td></tr><tr><td>nadine_morano (UMP)</td><td>381</td></tr><tr><td>MLP_officiel (FN)</td><td>138</td></tr><tr><td>f_philippot (FN)</td><td>132</td></tr><tr><td>JLMelenchon (FdG)</td><td>129</td></tr><tr><td>Harlemdesir (PS-PRG)</td><td>85</td></tr><tr><td>BriceHortefeux (UMP)</td><td>85</td></tr><tr><td>MAlliotMarie (UMP)</td><td>39</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote n="106">106 http://jsherpin.fr/, consulté le 14 août 2015</footnote>
Le premier élément, en comparaison avec ce qui a été précédemment énoncé, est que le nombre total de tweets publiés par le premier candidat tête de liste, ici Christine Boutin, est inférieur au nombre de tweets publié par le dixième candidat du tableau 5. Ce qui indique une utilisation plus importante de l'outil par les candidats non tête de liste. Ainsi, si l'on compare les deux premiers de chaque tableau, on constate qu'il y a une différence proche du triple dans la publication de tweets. Ceci nous permet de mettre en évidence le fait que les candidats disposant d'une faible notoriété utilisent Twitter au service de cette dernière. Le graphique présenté ci-dessous illustre cette différence dans la production de tweets, où l'on constate la faible production des candidats têtes de liste par rapport à l'ensemble des tweets observés.

<figure><img src="image_43.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.3 – Proportion des tweets publiés par les candidats et les têtes de liste, par rapport au nombre de tweets observé</figcaption></figure>

### (ii) Candidats ayant fait le plus de retweets

Par l'intermédiaire de cette requête, nous avons cherché à connaître la fréquence de RT des différents candidats. Ceci permet de comprendre l'usage que font les candidats de l'outil Twitter, et principalement de l'un des indicateurs permettant d'introduire une relation avec d'autres utilisateurs, le retweet. Le RT étant une manière de faire « écho » à un message précédemment publié. Le croisement de ces données peut également s'avérer efficace puisqu'une mise en lien avec le nombre total de tweets de l'utilisateur nous permet de savoir quelle est la part de sa production personnelle d'information et le relais qu'il peut faire à d'autres. Notons toutefois que le RT peut être agrémenté d'un commentaire prenant différentes formes (critique, précision, etc.) et devenir à son tour une source d'information. Le tableau, ci-dessous, présente les résultats pour les dix candidats ayant fait le plus de RT.
<table><caption>Tableau 8-7 – Extrait : Nombre de retweets par candidat avec son parti</caption><thead><tr><td>Identifiant du candidat</td><td>Nom du parti</td><td>Nombre de RT</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>bdelgendre</td><td>Nous Citoyens</td><td>1557</td></tr><tr><td>Relf_PP</td><td>Parti Pirate</td><td>788</td></tr><tr><td>DianVatlo</td><td>Nouvelle Donne</td><td>714</td></tr><tr><td>JulienAyoun</td><td>UDI-MODEM</td><td>708</td></tr><tr><td>DominiqueRiquet</td><td>UDI-MODEM</td><td>670</td></tr><tr><td>JoelRoman75</td><td>EELV</td><td>646</td></tr><tr><td>CecileMonnier</td><td>Nouvelle Donne</td><td>590</td></tr><tr><td>JB_COUTELIS</td><td>Nouvelle donne</td><td>568</td></tr><tr><td>louisdeguyon</td><td>Parti Europeen</td><td>549</td></tr><tr><td>M_GHISALBERTI</td><td>UMP</td><td>538</td></tr></tbody></table>

Nous pouvons observer que l'utilisation du RT représente une part plus ou moins importante de la participation sur *Twitter* selon les candidats. Ainsi, on peut constater que l'utilisateur bdelgendre a plus de 80 % de ses publications qui sont en fait des RT là où le candidat louisdeguyon a un peu plus de 25 % de ses publications qui sont des RT. Cependant, comme nous l'avons précisé précédemment, les profils de ces deux candidats sont différents, puisque louisdeguyon est également tête de liste du Parti Européen dont il est le principal acteur. De plus, nous pouvons constater, par rapport aux résultats précédents, l'apparition de nouveaux comptes de candidats, comme celui de DianVatlo, qui souligne le fait que certains candidats ont utilisé le dispositif *Twitter* principalement en soutien et en relais de messages d'autres utilisateurs.

Puis sur le même modèle que pour les autres requêtes, nous avons recherché le nombre de RT de chaque candidat tête de liste, dont les résultats sont présentés dans le tableau suivant. Nous précisons que nous n'avons pas pu obtenir les résultats concernant Harlem Désir et Brice Hortefeux pour cette requête.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-8 – Nombre de tweets par candidat tête de liste avec son parti</caption><thead><tr><td>Identifiant du candidat</td><td>Nom du parti</td><td>Nombre de RT</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>christineboutin</td><td>Force Vie</td><td>520</td></tr><tr><td>corinnelepage</td><td>Europe Citoyenne</td><td>328</td></tr><tr><td>nadine_morano</td><td>UMP</td><td>326</td></tr><tr><td>josebove</td><td>EELV</td><td>255</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><thead><tr><td>Identifiant du candidat</td><td>Nom du parti</td><td>Nombre de RT</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>JLMelenchon</td><td>FDG</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>MAlliotMarie</td><td>FN</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>MLP_officiel</td><td>FN</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>f_philippot</td><td>UMP</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>Vincent_Peillon</td><td>PS</td><td>1</td></tr></tbody></table>

Au travers de ces résultats, nous retrouvons un classement de participation sensiblement identique au classement obtenu lorsque nous avons recherché le nombre de tweets de chaque candidat. Cependant, il convient de mettre en relation les deux résultats (nombre de tweets et de retweets) pour donner du sens à ces derniers. Nous constatons ainsi que la proportion d'utilisation de RT n'est pas la même pour tous les candidats, ce qu'illustre le graphique ci-dessous. Ainsi, les quatre premiers présentent une proportion de RT par rapport à leurs tweets de plus de 50%, jusqu'à 85% pour Nadine Morano. Ces résultats rejoignent nos remarques précédentes sur les RT. Pour les autres candidats, les proportions ne sont pas aussi importantes, ce qui de notre point de vue révèle une utilisation particulière de Twitter, compte tenu de leur qualité de tête de liste. En effet, cela montre qu'ils ont principalement utilisé le dispositif pour transmettre à leurs followers des informations, des avis, des remarques, etc. d'une manière à être, à leur tour, retweeté par les autres utilisateurs.

<figure><img src="image_44.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.4 – Nombre de tweets comparé au nombre de RT pour les candidats tête de liste</figcaption></figure>
Pour cette observation, nous pouvons donc considérer qu'il existe différentes logiques à l'œuvre dans la production de tweets. En effet, si certains candidats sont dans une logique de production, c'est-à-dire que leur nombre de tweets est supérieur à leurs nombres de RT, d'autres candidats s'inscrivent dans une logique de reproduction, lorsque le nombre de RT est supérieur au nombre de tweets. De la même manière, on peut observer que les candidats ayant le plus tweetés au cours de la période, sont ceux qui font un usage assez important du RT.

## 8.4 Appréhender la circulation de l'information sur Twitter, exemple et perspectives

L'étude de l'usage qui est fait du dispositif par les candidats et les partis nous permet de mieux mesurer leur implication, leur intégration et leur appropriation des réseaux socionumériques. Pour compléter notre étude, nous avons souhaité présenter les prémisses d'une étude élargie en complément de l'analyse des utilisateurs et qui concerne les messages et leur circulation. Avant de présenter ces résultats, nous tenons à rappeler qu'il s'agit ici d'une expérience dont les résultats restent hypothétiques dans leur interprétation. En effet, bien que nous ayons suivi une méthodologie stricte dans la recherche sur les données, leur signification reste à éprouver dans la durée. Ainsi, l'exploitation de la base de données nous offre la possibilité de faire ressortir des variables concernant – comme dans le cas présenté dans les lignes suivantes – le nombre de RT de tweets de chaque candidat et des partis qu'ils représentent. Ainsi, après avoir observé l'activité des candidats et des partis, nous nous sommes interrogés sur le nombre de fois où un tweet de candidat avait été retweeté. L'objectif étant de voir, en fonction d'une production initiale et mesurée dans les résultats précédents, comment ces messages sont repris par les utilisateurs, et donc quels étaient les candidats têtes de listes, puis les partis, qui avaient été les plus retweetés.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-9 – Nombre de RT de tweets de chaque candidat tête de liste</caption><thead><tr><td>Nom du candidat</td><td>Parti</td><td>Nombre total de RT de tweets</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Marine Le Pen</td><td>FN</td><td>14678</td></tr><tr><td>Florian Philippot</td><td>FN</td><td>10917</td></tr><tr><td>Jean-Luc MELENCHON</td><td>Front de Gauche</td><td>6846</td></tr><tr><td>Aymeric Chauprade</td><td>FN</td><td>4490</td></tr><tr><td>François Asselineau</td><td>UPR</td><td>3379</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><thead><tr><td>Nom du candidat</td><td>Parti</td><td>Nombre total de RT de tweets</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Corinne Morel-Darleux</td><td>Front de Gauche</td><td>3045</td></tr><tr><td>Nicolas Dupont-Aignan</td><td>Debout la République</td><td>2958</td></tr><tr><td>Louis ALIOT</td><td>FN</td><td>2578</td></tr><tr><td>Denis Payre</td><td>Nous citoyens</td><td>2444</td></tr><tr><td>Yannick JADOT</td><td>EELV</td><td>2290</td></tr></tbody></table>

On constate ici qu'en ce qui concerne les dix premiers candidats têtes de liste, quatre d'entre eux appartiennent au FN. Les deux premiers de cette liste étant respectivement Marine Le Pen, présidente du FN et son vice-président, Florian Philippot. On retrouve en troisième position Jean-Luc Mélenchon qui présente néanmoins un écart assez important en nombre de RT par rapport aux deux premiers candidats cités. Cette place importante occupée par les deux premiers candidats du FN s'illustre plus nettement dans le graphique ci-dessous (figure 9).

<figure><img src="image_45.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.5 – Pourcentage de RT de tweets de chaque candidat tête de liste</figcaption></figure>

Concernant les trois premiers résultats de cette liste, nous pouvons mettre en rapport ce résultat avec les résultats précédents qui portaient sur la part de RT dans la production de tweets (cf, tableau 8 et figure 8). On peut ainsi constater que, si l'on croise ces deux résultats, les candidats qui s'inscrivent dans une logique
de production de tweets semblent correspondre à ceux qui sont le plus retweetés sur *Twitter*. De plus, nous pouvons ici constater deux éléments. L'un concerne la forte représentation de candidats du FN, quatre sur dix, ce qui souligne le fort écho dont leurs tweets ont bénéficié sur *Twitter*. L'autre est l'absence de candidats issus des partis tels que l'UMP ou le PS.

De la même manière, nous avons voulu faire ressortir le nombre de RT de tweets des partis politiques. Comme nous l'avons vu précédemment, les tweets des partis sont principalement effectués dans le but de soutenir les prises de parole des candidats sur le terrain. Ils ont en effet réalisé un nombre de RT qui couvre sensiblement la totalité de leur publication.

<table><caption>Tableau 8-10 - Nombre de RT de tweets de chaque parti</caption><thead><tr><td>Partis</td><td>Nombre total de RT de tweets</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>FN</td><td>47169</td></tr><tr><td>Front de Gauche</td><td>16934</td></tr><tr><td>UMP</td><td>12629</td></tr><tr><td>EELV</td><td>12520</td></tr><tr><td>UDI-MODEM</td><td>12224</td></tr><tr><td>PS - PRG</td><td>8422</td></tr><tr><td>Nous citoyens</td><td>5020</td></tr><tr><td>UPR</td><td>4234</td></tr><tr><td>Debout La Republique</td><td>4001</td></tr><tr><td>Force vie</td><td>3483</td></tr></tbody></table>

De ce fait, si nous prenons l'exemple du FN et que nous croisons les différents résultats obtenus, nous pouvons constater qu'ils ont publié 3381 tweets dont l'intégralité était des RT de leurs candidats. Ces 3381 tweets ont, à leur tour, été retweetés 47169 fois. Ce qui nous permet de constater la forte mobilisation de relais d'opinion, d'adhérents ou de sympathisants concernant ce parti. Comme nous pouvons le remarquer dans le graphique ci-dessous, le pourcentage obtenu par le FN sous cet angle est considérable.
<figure><img src="image_46.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.6 – Pourcentage de RT de tweets de chaque parti</figcaption></figure>

Pourtant, si la chambre d'écho produite par *Twitter* est importante, il n'en est pas de même pour les autres partis. Si nous considérons EELV, qui est le parti ayant produit le plus de tweets sur la période (9725), on constate que le pourcentage de RT s'inscrit dans la moyenne des dix premiers partis les plus retweetés. Ceci nous permet de considérer qu'il n'existe pas de relations entre une production importante de tweets et le relais qui peut en être fait sur *Twitter*.

## 8.5 Conclusion

Un des enjeux de notre recherche a été de comprendre et de mesurer le niveau des relations entre les acteurs et d'offrir des interprétations permettant de comprendre et de définir les mécanismes mis en œuvre sur les dispositifs socionumériques qui font que la communication prend forme entre les élus, les citoyens et les médias. Dans une perspective parallèle, au travers d'un article portant sur l'usage de *Twitter* par les journalistes, G. Brachotte et A. Frame (2015) notaient que : « même si l'usage et le "style Twitter" (Thimm/Dang-Anh/Einspänner ; 2011, 2012) semblent plutôt passifs qu'actifs, les journalistes maîtrisent les codes du dispositif sociotechnique et l'utilisent à la fois comme outil de veille, de diffusion et d'interaction, mais à des degrés différents ».
<figure><img src="image_47.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.7 – Correspondance entre l'activité déclarée sur Twitter et les fonctions principales du dispositif (Brachotte/Frame, 2015)</figcaption></figure>

Il pourrait en être de même pour l’usage qui est fait du dispositif par les per-
sonnalités politiques, tout au moins c’est ce que nous avons tenté de mettre en
évidence à travers nos analyses réalisées sur le corpus de tweets collectés et plus
spécifiquement par le biais de la maîtrise de ce que nous avons choisi de nommer
des indicateurs d’interactions (soit les codes propres au dispositif qui permettent
d’entrer en relation avec d’autres utilisateurs). Ainsi, en observant l’utilisation
des hashtags, mention et retweets, nous retrouvons ces mêmes mécanismes entre
logiques d’écriture et de lecture, de veille et de diffusion (fig.3).

<figure><img src="image_48.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.8 – Processus d’interaction au travers des fonctions principales du dispositif</figcaption></figure>
Parallèlement à cet usage des plateformes par les politiques, nous pouvons ob-
server et constater que les échanges entre ces derniers et les individus se déve-
loppent sur les réseaux socionumériques. De ce fait, la question se pose de savoir
s'il existe des mécanismes, des formes courantes d'une « ritualité numérique »
(Lardellier, 2013), qui régissent l'usage des réseaux sociaux, et donc de Twitter,
par les politiques. Ces ritualités seraient identifiables par l'échange, le partage
et l'appropriation de symboles autour de l'élaboration des tweets<fnref n="107" />, et donc des
interactions présentes dans le dispositif, dans un processus de co-construction et
de coproduction de celui-ci par les utilisateurs (fig.4).

<figure><img src="image_49.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8.9 – Interactions et ritualités dans les échanges sur Twitter dans le cadre du projet TEE2014</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="107">107 Les tweets peuvent ainsi prendre différentes formes et renvoyer à d'autres médias présents sur le Web. Concernant les formes, on peut rapidement évoquer l'utilisation de mots ou expressions accolés à un hashtag (dont l'utilisation est indiquée par un « # » et qui permettent de se référer à un thème ou un sujet précis). Il est également possible de s'adresser à un autre utilisateur de la plateforme en inscrivant dans le message le symbole « @ », ce qui permet de rechercher l'interaction avec un autre utilisateur. De la même manière, le retweet (RT) est une façon de faire écho à une information que l'on souhaite partager. De plus, on peut insérer des liens de type adresse URL ou encore des images et/ou des vidéos. Enfin il est également possible de tweeter sans utiliser de marqueurs spécifiques (tels que #, @, etc.), en respectant la limite des 140 caractères en insérant une citation, posant une question ou juste en donnant son avis.</footnote>
Le rapprochement à la dimension rituelle du dispositif est lié au fait que, pour se propager, un message « tweet » est dépendant du nombre de retweets. De la même manière, pour qu’un sujet soit discuté, il faut qu’il soit inscrit sous un hashtag afin de que se fédère, sous ce hashtag, un nombre plus ou moins important d’utilisateurs qui s’interpellent entre eux au moyen d’une mention. Ainsi, l’analyse de ces différents types d’échanges, au travers de l’utilisation de symboles imposés par le dispositif dont les utilisateurs se sont appropriés les codes qui constituent des indicateurs d’interactions, permet de comprendre comment s’organise l’usage des partis et des candidats et comment les informations circulent. Enfin, ces analyses nous permettent de voir comment les candidats se sont organisés pour apparaître sur les réseaux sociaux, de voir quelles stratégies ont été adoptées pour mettre en scène leur vie quotidienne et aussi politique, et ainsi nous aide à découvrir leur choix en matière d’« identwité » (Mercier, 2013), choix qui s’effectue dans le cadre d’un usage normatif du dispositif lié à leur rôle d’acteurs politiques, mais aussi en fonction des possibilités d’expressivité individuelle qu’offre Twitter, où l’identité numérique qui est construite au travers de la présence dans un dispositif vient renforcer l’identité réelle au travers de jeux d’exposition de soi (Allard/Vandenberghe, 2003).

L’utilisation de ces symboles, partagés par la communauté des utilisateurs, permet de s’offrir une meilleure visibilité sur le réseau. En effet, dans le processus qui accompagne la construction de son identité en ligne, l’utilisateur est amené à partager différents marqueurs de la reconnaissance identitaire (Cardon, 2008). L’appropriation des règles et des codes du dispositif permet de compléter sa démarche d’intégration symbolique dans un dispositif. Ainsi, utiliser le hashtag ou le RT par exemple, participe d’une certaine manière à compléter le dispositif identitaire et à s’inscrire dans la communauté des utilisateurs « initiés ». Cette observation a joué un rôle important dans l’objectif d’analyser la construction des relations en ligne au sein du dispositif Twitter puisque nous nous sommes appuyés sur ces codes partagés pour extraire des données sur l’usage du dispositif par les politiques.

Cette recherche exploratoire nous a permis d’interroger le contenu des comptes des utilisateurs, candidats et partis lors de l’élection européenne de 2014. Les constats opérés nécessitent encore de larges analyses comparatives qui pourront confirmer ou infirmer notre propos. Toutefois, bien qu’il s’agisse d’une phase d’expérimentation, notre premier bilan nous indique qu’il est possible d’exploiter ces données afin de produire des bases quantitatives sur lesquelles peuvent se fonder nos analyses.
Ainsi, si les requêtes considérées individuellement proposent des résultats qui n'apparaissent pas forcément significatifs pour répondre aux différentes questions que nous avons posées au début de cet article, c'est par l'intermédiaire des opérations de croisements et d'interprétations que nous parvenons à mettre en lumière les pratiques et les usages des candidats. Par exemple, si l'on essaie de mesurer le degré d'intégration des pratiques liées à l'usage de *Twitter* au sein des différentes formations politiques, il est possible de croiser les données d'utilisation des différents moyens d'échanges du dispositif. Pour ce faire, on peut extraire les données relatives à l'utilisation globale de *Twitter* par un parti (nombre de tweets), et de les confronter à l'ensemble des tweets contenant un RT ou un hashtag. Le résultat de cette analyse permet de mettre en lumière l'usage qui est fait de *Twitter* par la formation politique. Par exemple, un niveau élevé des indicateurs d'interactions indiquera une appropriation importante du dispositif alors qu'un niveau faible pourra révéler une pratique balbutiante ou une méconnaissance de l'outil pouvant entraîner un mésusage.

De plus, les résultats mettent en évidence une participation inégale des partis (en nombre de tweets et de RT). Concernant les RT réalisés par les partis, ils ont principalement servis à soutenir les publications des candidats. De plus, sur les données observées à propos des candidats, on constate que les candidats à faible notoriété ont eu un usage de *Twitter* plus important que les candidats têtes de listes. Cela souligne la place de *Twitter* comme un outil servant à la prise de parole dans l'espace public élargi par les dispositifs socionumériques. Enfin, le croisement des données entre tweets et RT des candidats têtes de liste, nous indique que les usages sont différents, entre logique de production et de reproduction. Pour les partis, nous pouvons constater que le FN, qui a remporté cette élection en France, est largement en tête sur le dispositif. Cela peut apparaître comme un marqueur pertinent de la popularité. Cependant, cette popularité « virtuelle » ne se confirme pas si l'on regarde le second de ce classement qui est le Front de Gauche. Aussi, si nous constatons que la popularité sur *Twitter* peut refléter une tendance, elle n'est nullement représentative d'une probabilité de résultat et peut au mieux, se rapporter au résultat d'un sondage d'opinion. Toutefois, ce n'est pas dans cet objectif que nous réalisons cette étude qui vise davantage à comprendre les utilisations faites du dispositif *Twitter* et son rôle potentiel dans l'échange d'informations et donc, en conséquence dans les stratégies de communication mises en œuvre par les candidats et les partis.
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Brachotte, G., Frame A., L'usage de *Twitter* par des journalistes politiques français : un outil de recomposition de la pratique professionnelle journalistique, in Liénard, F., & Zlitni, S. (Eds.). (2015). *La communication électronique: enjeux, stratégies, opportunités*. Limoges, France: Lambert-Lucas, DL 2015.

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Caja Thimm, Jessica Einspänner-Pflock & Mario Anastasiadis,
University of Bonn

# 9. Twitter during the 2014 European Elections in Germany – Analyzing politicians’ campaigning strategies

## Abstract

This chapter examines the different tweeting strategies of the electoral candidates in Germany during the EU election 2014. Based on 8219 tweets, quantitative and qualitative analyses are carried out in order to find out about the ways EU candidates convey their messages on Twitter. Are classic forms of campaign communication still central to political advocates in the social media world or have these been extended or substituted by new digital forms of communicating?

## 9.1 Mediatized politics and the European elections

Since the advent of the internet questions of its potential impact on all levels (micro, meso, macro) and all actors have been at the very core of many studies in political and communication science (Kamps, 2007, Strömbäck, 2008, Schweitzer & Albrecht, 2011, Vowe, 2013). In this respect, the appropriation of the internet by political parties and politicians, especially as a tool for refining political campaigning strategies, is becoming more important. Even though “there is still a lively debate about whether e-campaigning replicates the patterns of offline campaigning or contributes to a fundamental change in the democratic discourse, there is little doubt that the internet is increasingly important as a tool for political parties and candidates to provide information and stimulate political engagement” (Vergeer, Hermans, Sams, 2011, 478).

Whereas in the pre-internet era, political campaigning clearly was uni-directional (Norris, 2000), social media can serve as a technical infrastructure in which the communicative gap between the political sphere and the voters can be diminished (Carpentier, 2011, Bürger and Dorn-Fellermann, 2014). Besides, social media enhance the political actors’ possibilities to bypass traditional mass media gatekeepers and to address potential voters directly (Lilleker and Jackson, 2011). Also, social media like Facebook and Twitter play a crucial role for the ongoing personalization of politics and political campaigning (Enli and Skogerbø, 2013). More and more political actors utilize these digital tools as an enhanced
possibility to address voters and to communicate key messages, especially during
times of elections. Social media have become integrated parts of professionalized
and strategic political campaigning communication.

Since the very first one in 1979, the EU elections have always attracted less voter
participation and media attention than national elections (de Vreese et al., 2006,
Giebler and Wüst, 2011). For many voters the EU election serves very much as a
proxy for national issues (Marsh, 1998, Brunsbach et al. 2011). Reif and Schmitt
(1980) even characterize the EU election as a second order election, because a
lot of voters go to the polls with a view to national issues rather than European
politics. This also refers to a periodically diagnosed lack of public legitimation
of European politics, actors and institutions, not least reflected in low election
turnouts in a lot of the EU member states. This deficit is also linked to the fact that
more and more decision-making processes are being transferred from national
parliaments to the European level, whereas the formation of political will is still
closely linked to national issues in the respective EU member states. This also leads
to widespread ignorance among voters regarding supranational party alliances as
well as most politicians on the EU level, who remain almost unknown to a major
part of the European public sphere. Against this backdrop, all political actors on
the EU level require increased communication efforts to inform voters, to get in
dialogue, and to justify itself.

The high fragmentation of the European public sphere in terms of language,
cultural, or economic differences, means that political campaigning is challenging
for political actors and institutions alike. Social media like Facebook or Twitter
raise questions as to whether the digital public sphere online can bring forth a
supranational European public, or if the digital public sphere should rather be
described as an even more fragmented accumulation of several coexisting national
publics.

The internet, and especially social media, provide political actors with commu-
nication tools, which can help to bridge the gap between EU politics and voters.
The aim of this paper is to assess patterns of politicians’ Twitter activity in terms
of political campaigning by drawing on distinct qualitative results gained from
the analysis of politicians’ tweets.

## 9.2. Twitter and political campaigning

By keeping up with their responsibility to create public interest and to inform
about political decision making processes, politicians using social media contrib-
ute to making EU politics more tangible (Bieber and Schwöbel, 2011). The micro
blogging platform Twitter has become an increasingly relevant tool for political
campaigning. Its use can be analysed as part of an ongoing process of moderniza-
tion and mediatization of political communication in general and campaigning
in particular, in which new communication technologies are being adopted by
candidates, parties, political communication strategists and voters. As Bruns and
Highfield (2013) state, the adoption of social media is a global trend for national,
regional, local and international elections alike. Social media visibility nowadays
is one key factor to electoral success.

Whereas in the US, Barack Obama already started using Twitter during his
2008 campaign, Europeans have taken more time to adopt Twitter for political
communication activities. During the EU election 2009 for example, Twitter was
only rarely used for political campaigning. Within five years, Twitter has gained
more and more relevance as a tool for monitoring and participating in the public
discourse among politicians and citizens alike. It is Twitter's affordance of rapid
information distribution and the possibility it gives users to share news and ar-
guments that are influencing the digital discourse. Drawing on existing research
(Larrosa-Fuentes, 2015, Thimm et al., 2016) it can be assumed that especially
during times of election politicians use Twitter as a "public stage" in order to
advertise their campaign goals. They do this strategically, for example by upload-
ing pictures from campaign events or tweeting personal status updates and thus
appear to be approachable.

In Germany, about 56 million people (79,5 % of the population) use the in-
ternet (Frees and Koch, 2015) and 67 % of them (36 million) actively use social
networks (Bitkom, 2013).

Compared to other EU countries, especially France or Spain, Twitter in Ger-
many has not yet carved out its niche, even though public and media attention
is growing and Twitter usage seems to increase continuously. Regarding Twitter
usage statistics, however, it seems difficult to gain reliable numbers since different
measurements and methods exist. Different studies lead to varying results ranging
from 3.8 million users (Statista, 2013) to 10 million (b4p, 2014). Another study
distinguishes active and passive users (ARD/ZDF 2014, n=1434). According to
this, 9 % (5 million) of the German internet users connect to Twitter less than once
a week and 5 % (2,8 million) use the micro blogging platform every week. The
second method by which Twitter usage is measured is based upon the analysis of
the Twitter users' account information and aggregates the given information about
time zone, language and location. However, as it is not mandatory to specify such
information when using Twitter, the respective data is fragmentary. This leads to
significantly lower results regarding user statistics from these studies compared
to the aforementioned ones. For example, calculations from PeerReach (2013)
state a Twitter penetration rate for Germany of 1 %, which is only around half a million active Twitter users.

A closer look at the adoption of Twitter by German politicians with a mandate for the National Parliament in 2013 (around 10 months before the EU election) reveals that almost four fifths of Green Party members the parliament had a Twitter account (79,4 %), followed by The Left Party (65,3 %), the Free Democrats (61,3 %), the Social Democrats (50,7 %) and the Christian Democrats (39,7 %) (Fuchs, 2013) (Figure 1). This adds up to 328 politicians out of 620 members of the German Parliament in 2013 who use Twitter.

<figure><img src="image_50.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.1: Twitter adoption in the German National Parliament in July 2013 in % (Fuchs, 2013, ©hamburger-wahlbeobachter.de)</figcaption></figure>

The numbers show that compared to the “average citizens” MEPs in Germany () can be regarded as more active Twitter users. Among German parliamentarians, the usage of the micro blogging platform as a tool for political campaigning seems common. Noticeable is that the EU Election, which took place in May 2014, only caused a marginal increase in the adoption of Twitter on the national level.

## 9.3 Analyzing campaign strategies of German EU-candidates on Twitter

The data of the present study consist of tweets sent by the German candidates during the 2014 European Election. They were collected three weeks before and one week after the EU election day (4th of May until 1st of June, 2014). This time frame was chosen in order to document not only tweets during the “hot” phase in the run-up to the election day but also during the following week when the election results are discussed on Twitter. Hence, the data do give some insights
into the more general relation between Twitter as a communication tool and permanent campaigning.

The tweets were collected via Twitter's streaming and search APIs with the help of the open source solution SNFreezer (http://sourceforge.net/projects/snfreezer/). After the data collection, the tweets went through a process of data cleaning and were then analyzed using a combination of quantitative (SPSS) and qualitative tools (QDA Miner).

In the following section, we first give a quantitatively focused overview of the candidates' activity on Twitter during the election, before we finally turn to the qualitative analyses and assessment of their communication strategies.

### 9.3.1 German EU Politicians' Twitter activity

Altogether, 8,219 tweets were collected from a total of 106 German candidates, from which, however, only 68 were tweeting actively (see table 1 for an overview of the data obtained). Even though using Twitter nowadays is clearly more established among politicians than during the EU election 2009, there is still only a fraction of the German EU candidates who use it for campaigning purposes.

<table><caption>Tableau 9-1: Tweets collected during the EU Elections 2014 in Germany</caption><tr><td>Number of candidates in national corpus</td><td>1.103</td></tr><tr><td>Number of candidates on Twitter</td><td>108</td></tr><tr><td>% of candidates on Twitter</td><td>9,79 %</td></tr><tr><td>Number of candidates tweeting during period</td><td>68</td></tr><tr><td>% of candidates' accounts tweeting during period</td><td>62,96 %</td></tr><tr><td>Number of tweets sent by candidates</td><td>8,219</td></tr><tr><td>Average tweets per candidate tweeting</td><td>120,87</td></tr></table>

63 % of the German EU candidates owning a Twitter account were actively tweeting during the evaluation period. Candidates from the major parties were most active: The Christian Democrats (CDU) rank on top with 20 active candidates, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green Party both have 17 candidates tweeting actively, while the Free Democrats (FDP) have only four, the Left Party two and the extreme Right (NPD) only one candidate tweeting actively. This distribution of candidates' Twitter activity also reflected the parties' distribution of seats in the EU parliament, which was led by the CDU (29 seats), SPD (27 seats) and the Green Party (11 seats).
The results reveal that particularly the progressive and rather left-leaning parties, such as the Pirate Party, or the Green party, have been most active on Twitter during the EU campaign. However, in contrast to analyses of politicians' tweeting during the EU election 2009 in the Netherlands (Vergeer et al., 2011), our study shows that there is also a considerable number of politicians from the established or rather conservative parties, such as the Social or Christian Democrats, tweeting (see table 2).

<table><caption>Tableau 9-2: List of the top 10 German EU candidates based on the tweets sent during the election campaign.</caption><thead><tr><td>Rank</td><td>Twitter account name</td><td>Candidate's name</td><td>Party affiliation</td><td>Total tweets sent</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>@anked</td><td>Anke Domscheit-Berg</td><td>Pirate Party</td><td>1.266</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>@JanAlbrecht</td><td>Jan Philipp Albrecht</td><td>The Greens</td><td>810</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>@DosOz42</td><td>Fotios Amanatides</td><td>Pirate Party</td><td>680</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>@kliehm</td><td>Martin Kliehm</td><td>Pirate Party</td><td>560</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>@Gilles_PPDE</td><td>Gilles Bordelais</td><td>Pirate Party</td><td>534</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>@EuropaJens</td><td>Jens Geier</td><td>Social Democrats (SPD)</td><td>385</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>@CarstenOvens</td><td>Carsten Ovens</td><td>Christian Democrats (CDU)</td><td>301</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>@RebHarms</td><td>Rebecca Harms</td><td>The Greens</td><td>274</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>@JuttaSteinruck</td><td>Jutta Steinbruck</td><td>Social Democrats (SPD)</td><td>227</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>@TerryReintke</td><td>Terry Reintke</td><td>The Greens</td><td>198</td></tr></tbody></table>

While all top candidates of the major parties were tweeting, namely David McAllister from the Christian Democrats (CDU), Martin Schulz from the Social Democrats (SPD), and Rebecca Harms from the Green Party, the top candidates of the smaller and more polarizing parties like the new (eurosceptic) party Alternative for Germany (AfD, Bernd Lucke) or the far right party NPD (Udo Voigt) did not tweet (although both of them had a Twitter account). Even though these parties were tweeting via their official party accounts (such as @AfD_Bund) or had single candidates who tweeted (e.g. Jens Pühse from the NPD, also see below in section 3.2), these findings confirm the research of Vergeer et al. (2011) that fringe parties, especially the right wing, did not try to compensate their relatively low coverage in traditional mass media (airtime and newspapers) on Twitter. In this respect the smaller parties' top candidates still fail to use Twitter
as an alternative way to bypass traditional gatekeeping mechanisms and to reach
out for potential voters directly.

9.3.2 Patterns of politicians’ Twitter usage during the European
Election campaign 2014

The broader political context in which the EU election 2014 took place was
marked by the financial crisis in parts of Europe and the general strengthen-
ing of Eurosceptic and anti-European sentiments. The election results in some
countries reflected these tendencies by giving anti-European parties a majority
of the votes: In France for example, the right-wing Front National came in first
with 25 %, and in England, the anti-European party UKIP gained 27 % of the
votes. In Germany, Eurosceptic and anti-European parties like the “Alternative
for Germany” (AfD) and the right wing extremist National Party (NPD) stood
for election but both failed in their goals, since only 7 % of the votes went to the
AfD and 1 % to the NPD.

In the following paragraphs, we present findings from our qualitative analy-
ses of the EU candidates’ tweets, which point to consistent patterns of Twitter
usage with respect to campaign communication. Hereby, we less focus on the
candidates’ topical contributions to EU politics but more on the strategies and
mechanisms of their Twitter communication. Building on categorizations of
traditional campaigning strategies but by taking into account the specifics of
the micro blogging environment, the following categories of *Twitter campaign-
ing* can be identified:

* Passive Twitter presence

* Informing & broadcasting

* On-the-scene and live-reportage

* Self-promotion

* Negative campaigning

* Creating mini-publics

* Interacting on the public Twitter stage

* Emphasizing and establishing supranational alliances

(1) *Passive Twitter presence*

A large number of the German EU candidates who had a Twitter profile were inac-
tive and did not tweet at all during the evaluation period. Interestingly, the inactive
or “alibi” accounts, often received tweets from other Twitter users nevertheless.
One particularly interesting case is that of Alexander Graf Lambsdorff (@Lambs-
dorff), top candidate of the Free Democrats (FDP) and a well-known member of the European Parliament. Although this candidate has a Twitter profile he did not send a single tweet during the election campaign 2014, but received a lot of tweets in return: Within the four weeks evaluation period, 509 tweets were directly addressed to or mentioning @Lambsdorff. Apart from that, 114 tweets contain the hashtag #Lambsdorff and 712 tweets the keyword "Lambsdorff" (without #). The altogether 1335 tweets mentioning the politician's name (with or without the @- or #-operator) indicate that Lambsdorff is a key figure in German Euro-politics and hence a person of interest to the Twitter public. In fact, compared to the other 106 politicians in the data set, Lambsdorff is ranked amongst the top 10 German EU candidates receiving the most attention on Twitter although being the only one of them who did not send a single tweet during the corresponding period (see table 3).

<table><caption>Tableau 9-3: List of the top 10 German EU candidates based on tweets they received during the campaign</caption><thead><tr><td>Rank</td><td>Twitter account name</td><td>Candidate's name</td><td>Party affiliation</td><td>Total tweets received</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>@MartinSchulz</td><td>Martin Schulz</td><td>Social Democrats (SPD)</td><td>15 923</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>@sven_giegold</td><td>Sven Giegold</td><td>The Greens</td><td>2 741</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>@SkaKeller</td><td>Ska Keller</td><td>The Greens</td><td>2 578</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>@JanAlbrecht</td><td>Jan Philipp Albrecht</td><td>The Greens</td><td>1 644</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>@TerryReintke</td><td>Terry Reintke</td><td>The Greens</td><td>1 404</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>@Lambsdorff</td><td>Alexander Lambsdorff</td><td>Free Democrats (FDP)</td><td>1 335</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>@davidmcallister</td><td>David McAllister</td><td>Christian Democrats (CDU)</td><td>1 238</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>@RebHarms</td><td>Rebecca Harms</td><td>The Greens</td><td>1 149</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>@bueti</td><td>Reinhard Bütikofer</td><td>The Greens</td><td>900</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>@MarkusFerber</td><td>Markus Ferber</td><td>Christian Democrats (CSU)</td><td>293</td></tr></tbody></table>

When looking at the tweets addressing Lambsdorff, it becomes evident that they often refer to the politician's offline campaigning activities. Media accounts or journalists report about Lambsdorff's statements in interviews or during campaign events, such as the party congress of the FDP (marked with #fdpbpt - "FDP party congress"). Affiliated party accounts or fellow politicians praise Lambsdorff
in their tweets and often underline their arguments with multimedia content, e.g.,
@OlliLuksic and @FDP_Saar tweeted on May, 11th 2014:

"Alexander Graf Lambsdorff at the Party Congress in Dresden, Germany: serious, competent, sympathetic [inserted link to a YouTube clip from the party congress]".

In addition, citizens comment on the politician's public appearance by using rhetorical devices such as polemic or sarcasm:

"Populist #Lambsdorff warns against populists [inserted link to a news website]" (@pukki01, tweet sent 12 May, 2014)

"This #FDP demonstrates every day that they quite rightly got thrown out of the Parliament! [inserted link to a news website] #TTIP #Lambsdorff" (@DerRotschopf, tweet sent 15 May, 2014)

These brief examples show that even if a politician does not use his or her Twitter account actively for tweeting, just having a Twitter profile appears to be an important aspect of a digital campaigning strategy. Even if a politician does not use Twitter to actively communicate or engage in discussion, a Twitter account allows for being virtually present and connected and therefore "networkable" within the political Twitter sphere. In this respect a Twitter account is at least a symbolic representation of a politician – which is particularly important during election times – and enhances the politician's visibility within the digital public sphere.

## (2) Informing & Broadcasting

One of the candidates' most favorite Twitter activity patterns is the distribution of information relating to their campaign activities and events. This finding is in line with studies on politicians' Twitter usage in regional or national elections (Broersma and Graham, 2012, Thimm et al., 2014, 2016). Twitter is mainly used as a tool to distribute news and information. Politicians broadcast information to their followers in order to show that they are actively involved in the campaign and to stay visible in the digital public. Here is a typical example of a tweet sent by a politician of the Social Democrats (@Groote, Matthias Groote).
<figure><img src="image_51.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.2: Tweet of Matthias Groote “Brief pit stop in the office. Refilling the material. After that to Dötlingen to the AfA regional conference north [inserted link to Foursquare]”</figcaption></figure>

Overall, this pattern shows that some politicians use Twitter as a broadcasting medium, or as Vergeer et al. (2011, p. 469–497) put it, “the social medium devolves into a traditional uni-directional medium, not so much in its technical architecture but in its actual use”. It seems that the candidates’ Twitter accounts are predominantly used for “informing citizens, and not for being informed by citizens, or to communicate” (ibid.). As Thimm et al. (2012, 2016) show, this broadcasting strategy can also be described as the *topical-informative* tweeting style. This style refers to an activity pattern which is characterized by the intense usage of hyperlinks to external sources and a lack of mentioning or retweeting to others via the @- and RT operators. The information sharing and broadcasting style represents one of most frequently used patterns of political campaigning, as it is closely linked to self-presentation and self-staging as a politician. Consequently, the broadcasting style tends to come with a rather low proportion of interaction or dialogue with the voters.

### (3) On-the-scene and live-reportage

Closely linked to the information broadcasting pattern, a lot of candidates employ a strategy of “live reporting” from campaign events or other occasions they choose to tweet about. This on-the-scene and live-reportage pattern reflects Twitter’s relevance as a real time medium for instant communication. This strategy is characterized by the expansion of the limited text format of 140 signs by including links, videos or pictures from external sources. Due to these system options, politicians often illustrate their activities by adding photos to their tweets. One particular effect of this pattern is to allow backstage insights in real time. The tweet displayed below give a good example for this strategy. It was posted by Jean-Claude Juncker, leading candidate of the German conservative group, and shows himself and his counterpart from the socialist group, Martin Schultz, waiting for the TV duel to start:

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<figure><img src="image_52.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.3: Tweet of Jean-Claude Juncker before a TV duel</figcaption></figure>

However, the pattern is not limited to live reporting. It also includes tweets, which suggest an almost-live participation in the politicians' actions, as another example of Jean Claude-Juncker visiting a construction site in Athens demonstrates:

<figure><img src="image_53.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.4: Tweet of Jean-Claude Juncker from a construction site in Greece</figcaption></figure>
Although such insights are unquestionable elements of strategically planned communication, they reveal perspectives, which the traditional media usually do not offer, not least because of journalists deciding if such a piece of information is newsworthy. In this respect, the on-the-scene and live-reportage pattern very much represents the empowerment of political actors in terms of bypassing traditional journalistic gatekeepers.

### (4) Self-promotion

Another Twitter campaigning strategy, directly connected to Twitter's functionality and the politicians' empowerment to bypass traditional media gatekeepers, can be described as politicians' self-promotion. A lot of research suggests that this pattern is among the most commonly used during election campaigns (Grant et al., 2010, Larsson & Kalsnes, 2014).

> "Now in Potsdam together with @schierack_cdu and Christian Ehler (MEP) at the opening event on the municipal- and #Europeanelection! Thank you for the invitation:) #CDU" (@davidmcallister, *David McAllister, Christian Democrats*, tweet sent 5 May, 2014)

Self-promotion via Twitter allows politicians to communicate political information as well as personal insights into their private lives in order to present themselves in a particularly attractive way, underlining their proximity with voters and, for example, trying to appear young and active:

<figure><img src="image_54.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.5: Self-promotion strategy of a German EU candidate (Christian Democrat) showing his sport activity.</figcaption></figure>

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Additionally, their campaign teams use self-promotional tweets for retweeting, as an example from the Green politician Terry Reintke shows:

> "RT @RasmusAndresen: 2 end-fifties on the future of Europe. Good that there are young candidates like @SkaKeller @JanAlbrecht @TerryReintke"

Self-promotion on Twitter is an element of the increasing personalization of politics, which has been observed for more than a decade (Holtz-Bacha, 2006). Personalization, however, must not be mistaken for a higher amount of insights into the politicians' private lives. In fact, private tweets were rarely found in the dataset. On the one hand, this can be interpreted as an approach by the politicians to stick to the professional and 'factual' side of the campaign by mainly referring to political issues. On the other hand, this implies that insights into private events like for example family matters, are not part of the self-definition and self-presentational style of German politicians – at least in the Twitter public sphere.

## (5) Negative Campaigning

Another strategy put forward by politicians as well as their parties' accounts on Twitter is that of negative campaigning. In some political cultures negative campaigning is a frequently used means of putting the political opponents to the test, but it is, particularly in the German political sphere, a two-sided sword: Many voters don't like offensive criticism during election times (Walter et al., 2013). In the present dataset two main strategies of negative campaigning can be identified: The first has a focus on political content and is strongly connected to political issues, while the second is a strategy to offend the political opponent more on a personal level.

Figure 6 shows an example of the first category, in which negative campaigning gets aligned with concrete issues and political positions. In this tweet sent by the account of the German Green Party, it is argued that Martin Schulz (Social Democrats) overtly acts as if he was against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), although his parliamentary group actually voted for it. The issue of the TTIP has been a very important and controversial discussion topic in Germany during the EU election. It was mainly the smaller and partially left-leaning parties who were against the trade partnership, while the bigger, conservative and liberal parties put arguments forward favoring TTIP. For the first mentioned, it thus became an important task to use their Twitter presence (which slightly exceeds that of the conservative parties in quantitative terms, see section 3.1 above) in order to argument against the politically more powerful.
<figure><img src="image_55.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.6: Tweet of the Green Party criticizing Martin Schultz</figcaption></figure>

The second way of performing negative campaigning on Twitter can be seen as a strategy to subtly offend the political opponent on a more personal level (and less on the topical level): In a tweet sent by Daniel Caspary, EU candidate of the German conservatives (CDU) on May 14, 2014, a photo upload of a wilting green plant is tagged with the word “green” in different languages and spellings (including English and German). While the tweet content itself does not overtly relate to politics, however, seen in the context of 1) an EU candidate from an opposing party 2) tweeting this picture 3) during the election campaign it has to be interpreted as a political statement. In fact, subtle information in public communication is characterized by being deniable (Boyd and Marwick, 2011, 23), and the present example is definitely refutable.
<figure><img src="image_56.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.7: Subtle negative campaigning on Twitter</figcaption></figure>

When we compare our findings from the EU campaign with the data collected in national or regional election campaigns in Germany (i.e., “Bundestagswahl 2013”), we find less negative campaigning in the EU data set. It seems that mutual polemic or sarcastic comments among politicians are given a more meaningful stage on the national level than on the “higher” – and maybe more anonymous European level, where factual political content seems to be more relevant than personal sensitivities. This, however, has to remain a speculation as the qualitative assessment of tweets categorized as negative campaigning cannot be outweighed with a mere quantitative argument.

## (6) Creating Mini Publics

The many changes in political communication not only allow for optimistic perspectives on more political participation in all parts of the world (Tufekci and Wilson, 2012), they also point to a new challenge for politics and politicians: audiences are not easily reached anymore, as traditional mass media have lost

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their dominating role within public discourse. On the contrary, many claim there
has been a fragmentation of the public sphere (Webster and Ksiazek, 2012). In
more recent work, however, it is argued that any over-generalization might not
grasp the real activities of participants in the digital public and argue for a more
situated and contextualized approach (see contributions in Einspänner-Pflock et
al., 2014). If we see opinion formation and debates as a central quality of political
participation and political engagement, we have to regard smaller publics, such as
a hashtag discussion thread, as a part of the public sphere and not as a second rate
public, which has fallen victim to fragmentation (Thimm, 2016). Consequently,
more and more media scholars call for a 'rethinking of the public sphere' (see
contributions in Lunt and Livingstone 2013).

As Thimm (2016) suggests, the digital public sphere can best be conceptualized
as a network of “online mini-publics” which must be understood as ‘a group of
online users referring to a shared topic in a publicly visible and publicly accessible
online space over a period of time, by means of individual activities such as textual
or visual contributions’ (p. 227). These mini-publics can be differentiated from
the perspective of initiation into (1) user-initiated mini-publics, (2) event-driven
mini-publics, (3) commercially launched mini-publics and (4) institutionally/
politically launched mini-publics. In terms of political campaigning the event-
driven and institutionally launched mini publics are of higher relevance, because
it is an integral part of politicians’ Twitter usage to try to generate online mini
publics, in which potential voters can discuss and interact. Such politically-driven
mini publics are mostly hashtag based. The hashtag functions as the informative
technical element, which leads to certain topics and discussions in the Twitter
sphere. It is the main networking element that not only connects topics but also
the people participating in the respective discussions, i.e. in hashtag-communities
(Thimm et al., 2016, 179). Hashtag-based mini publics can serve as political echo
chambers in which a certain argumentation or a certain political position is pre-
sented and discussed. Online mini publics are intended to have a persuasive effect
on the potential voters, to advocate the party’s issues and to drive the campaign.
For this reason, forming hashtag-based mini publics is an integral part of the
political campaigns issue management strategy, and in this respect another effort
to set the agenda on Twitter.

As Martin Schulz was a endorsed by the German Social Democrats (SPD)
during the EU elections 2014 with their party account @spdde, Twitter support
was an expected consequence. Some hashtags were especially created for the cam-
paign. The most prominent example is #nowschulz. This slogan was often put at
the end of a tweet of Schulz (or his campaign team) and should motivate or active
his Twitter followers for his campaign. This hashtag does not have a relevance for EU politics but is only used as a marker for Schulze's campaign.

"RT @spdde: Germany is well off only when our European partners are well, too. #how-areyou #nowschulz http://t.co/CWAbc9g3Ee" (@MartinSchulz, *Social Democrats tweet sent 22 May, 2014*)

"RT @spdde: @MartinSchulz is right: Europe needs a perspective for the middle-class #nowschulz #howareyou. http://t.co/E6Ap9egLYN" (@MartinSchulz, *Social Democrats, tweet sent 22 May, 2014*)

Another case is the hashtagging strategy of the new party Alternative for Germany AfD. The party's main Twitter account @AfD_Bund served as their campaign organ on Twitter, with which they tried to make themselves part of the Twitter EU sphere. In the tweets sent from the party account the hashtag #AfD was often used together with the hashtag #EP2014 – one of the official hashtags related to the EU elections 2014 (acronym for “European Parliament 2014”). #EP2014 was also one of the most recognized hashtags during the EU election as it has been not only widely on Twitter but also in other online or offline contexts (e.g. in advertisements for the TV debate or in election posters). By linking this important hashtag with “their own” hashtag, the AfD tried to place their topics (mainly Eurosceptic arguments) in the Twitter sphere and to form a “hashtag family”. The party thus formed a mini public within the broader context of the digital public created around #EP2014.

## (7) Interacting on the public Twitter stage

Creating mini-publics on Twitter is also part of candidates' “public staging” strategy, which refers to their positive self-presentation in the digital public sphere. Two major forms of “Twitter staging” can be found, of which the first can be seen as a way of presenting oneself without an apparent substantive context, while the second is linked to political argumentation.

The following example, illustrating the first type of Twitter staging by candidates, shows a sequence of tweets referring to a TV interview with Alexandra Thein, EU candidate from the Free Democrats, sent and/or retweeted by the participating actors of the TV discussion.
<figure><img src="image_57.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.8: A sequence of acknowledgements for participating in a political TV discussion, sent and retweeted by the presenter and the politician alike.</figcaption></figure>

These kinds of allegedly ‘empty conversations’, which are full of self-praise and acknowledgements, are to be seen as part of the politicians’ self-presentation strategy – formed between authorities (e.g., journalists or other politicians) within an exclusive mini-public but meant to be “followed and judged by their voters” (Einspänner-Pflock et al., 2016: 62). Thus, politicians emphasize their belonging to a certain “exclusive” group or network of people.

The second form of Twitter staging by politicians can be found in tweets that form conversations or discussions, which are settled around a certain politically relevant topic. They are mostly contextualized (and thus found by other users) by a hashtag or the @-operator, as can be seen in figure 9. In the depicted Twitter conversation, two opposing politicians discuss aspects of the European social system, i.e. youth unemployment. The discussion also refers to one of the TV debates during EU election between Juncker and Schulz (see above (4)) and is tagged with #tvduell. On the one hand, the @-operator serves as the ‘conversational anchor’ between the two discussants as the tweets thus become technically linked to their accounts and the two politicians become notified upon a reply. On the other hand, this conversation is opened up to the larger interested Twitter-community around the TV debate as it is tagged with #TVduell. The hashtag here serves as a contextual marker.
<figure><img src="image_58.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.9: EU candidates Jens Geier (Social Democrats) and Ulrich Beul (Christian Democrats) discussing aspects of the European social system on Twitter</figcaption></figure>

The politicians' strategy of connecting and presenting oneself within these kinds of content-rich discussions on Twitter does not have a mere networking function as in the exclusive mini-publics but is more focused on presenting arguments related to a certain political question. By keeping up the conversation, the politicians are also able to show their commitment and respect towards their discussants and simultaneously give insights into their own political positions.

## (8) Emphasizing and establishing supranational political alliances

Political alliances between parties or parliamentary groups on the European level are not usually very well known to many voters since people feel more tied to their respective national parties and politicians. The desire to strengthen those alliances might be a reason why some politicians mark their supranational party alliance explicitly in their tweets. In the present dataset, we found candidates of the same supranational alliance who often relate and link to each other by using @-men-tions, retweets, hashtags, linked multimedia content or even emoticons in order to emphasize their closeness. Rebecca Harms from the Green Party for example did a campaign event where she went from Berlin to Brussels on a boat, accompanied by other "green" politicians from the Czech Republic and from Finland.
<figure><img src="image_59.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.10: Tweet of the Rebecca Harms, "This time it worked out again with the boat! From Brussels off to Berlin with @SkaKeller @odrejliska @HeidiHautala"</figcaption></figure>

Also the top candidate of the left, Gabi Zimmer, who started her Twitter account just one month before the EU elections 2014, used Twitter in order to strengthen supranational “leftist” alliances by retweeting or directly addressing party members of other European leftist parties:

> "Strong message of @tsipras_eu Alexis Tsipras, candidate of European Left #TellEurope May 15, 2014" (@Gabi_Zimmer, the left, tweet sent 15 May, 2014)

The endorsement of like-minded parties is often mutual, as a tweet from the Greek leftist Alexis Tsipras shows:
<figure><img src="image_60.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9.11: Tweet of Alexis Tsipras, call to vote for the Left Party</figcaption></figure>

Politicians choose this strategy to strengthen their network and to appear highly engaged within their party's activities.

## 9.4 Conclusion and Outlook

As a part of the mediatization of political communication Twitter becomes more and more an established tool for strategic communicative purposes, especially during times of election campaigns. While Germany is still lagging behind other European countries regarding Twitter usage for political communication, it seems that the politicians' usage of the microblogging tool in this regard is becoming more differentiated. What is striking is that politicians do not seem to use Twitter much to get into dialogue with citizens and voters, but predominantly to broadcast their messages to their followers and for self presentation. This leads to one of the most important consequences of social media usage within the framework of political campaigning: to bypass traditional media and journalistic gatekeepers. Social media indeed do set political actors free from structural and time-consuming limitations associated with traditional distribution channels and help them to avoid journalistic framing, for better or worse. For this reason, Twitter has become an integrated part of a strategically-organized communication
environment online, which almost every political actor tries to benefit from. The more online publics grow, the more important it becomes for political actors to establish themselves within a communication infrastructure of their own, outside traditional media. Looking at Twitter in particular, future research needs to focus on the question in how intensively the microblogging platform is used and which of the patterns of political campaigning still remain relevant. One pattern of special interest is the on-the-scene and live-reportage pattern. The Twitter affiliated new application “Periscope”, a live-reporting video tool, makes it seem very likely that these patterns will be of growing importance.

In terms of European politics there is still a special demand for political communication in the European public sphere – online and offline. For these reasons, EU related Twitter communication should also be analyzed outside electoral periods, but during political day-to-day-business and EU-wide crisis situations, for example like the increasingly difficult question of how EU countries deal with the growing number of refugees from the Middle East.

It does not seem very likely that the importance of Twitter will decrease in the near future, at least not as a tool for political campaigning. More research is needed to better understand in how far Twitter can play a specific role in the European online public sphere. In this context one of the most important challenges for future research will be to focus on Twitter’s fragmentation into myriads of different online mini-publics.

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Vittorio Cobianchi, Maria Francesca Murru & Marina Villa, UniCatt (Milan)<fnref n="108" />

# 10. Twitter and *double screen* in Italy during the 2014 European elections

**Abstract**

The chapter analyses the mutual hybridization between Twitter and television during European Elections 2014, paying attention to the ways in which the traditional role of gatekeeping played by television has been reframed by the networked connectivity made available by Twitter. A multi-method approach, consisting of content analysis (qualitative and lexical) and network analysis, has been applied to tweets published by political candidates and referred to television debates, and to tweets produced during the broadcasting of a popular Italian talk-show that hosted one of the main political actors of EP 2014.

## 10.1 Introduction

*Hybridity offers a powerful way of thinking about politics and society, a means of seeing the world that highlights complexity, interdependence, and transition. (...) It eschews simple dichotomies and it alerts us to the unusual things that happen when the new has continuities with the old (Chadwick 2013, p. 8)*

In line with what has been argued by Chadwick, the present contribution considers the hybridization of the current system of political communication as a key and a matter of inescapable reality. The hybridization we are seeing is rooted in the process of media convergence that has affected the size of the economic and technological infrastructure. But what interests us more is the way it looks in the dimension of languages and expressive forms of political communication. More specifically, our attention will focus on the cross-fertilization between the flow of conversations taking place on Twitter and the television format of political talk shows. There are two main reasons why we are interested in this object of research. First of all, the linguistic and expressive contamination between Twitter and television is linked to the growing phenomenon of the practices of “second screen-communication” (Colombo, 2015). According to the recent *Global Survey of the Digital Landscape* by Nielsen (Nielsen, 2015), in Europe 44 % of the popu-

<footnote n="108">108 The chapter has been discussed jointly by the three authors. Vittorio Cobianchi has written section 4, Maria Francesca Murru sections 1 and 2, Marina Villa section 3. Section 5 has been written by the three authors.</footnote>
lation goes online while watching television and 36 % follow live TV shows: By doing so, they have the chance to take part in conversations on social media. Data from Nielsen Italy (Nielsen Italy, 2015) say that the number of Twitter users who posted at least one comment on a television program has reached the number of 594,500 in 2015, increasing by 25 % over the previous year. The second reason is that both contexts of communication – the talk shows and the conversation on Twitter – host public debates that are extremely focused on – more or less – public characters or political issues. In the cases that we will consider as examples, the political talk shows – namely the TV debates in the European Elections in 2014 – have been the driving conversation on Twitter. Although it is difficult to evaluate the democratic quality of these conversations, we are confident that they represent an essential place for the formation of public opinion, on which civic cultures feed (Dahlgren, 2009). While it is now clear that the discussions that take place in the public spheres online are never or almost never approximate to the communicative inclusiveness and equality that are typical of deliberation (Habermas, 2006), it is equally undeniable that conversation in the media represents one of the most common communication patterns of the network society (van Dijk, 2005). As a matter of fact, this is an increasingly important site for public elaboration of symbols and meanings.

Social TV, which is the main subject of this chapter, highlights the mutual hybridization between two different conversational contexts: on the one hand, the talk show, the emblem of the traditional media which stages a political discussion usually limited to professional politicians, to presenters (often journalists) and to selected representatives of the public and civil society; on the other hand, the “networked” proscenium of Twitter, its conversational flows that combine public and private spheres (Papacharissi, 2010) and its relational variable geometry which is apparently scalable through the use of markers of speech as the hashtag (Bruns & Burgess, 2011). The analysis presented here explores the hybridization between television and Twitter starting from the dynamics of intersection between the two communication spaces. The first part of the study is focused on the tweets published by the candidates whose topics concerned TV shows. The second part of the analysis examines the tweets commenting on a popular Italian TV talk show, “Porta a Porta”, that has played an important role in the national campaign for the European Elections. Content analysis is applied both to the text of the television program and to the tweets that comment on the program: this procedure makes it possible to explore the interdependencies and the reciprocal hybridization between the two discursive spaces.
## 10.2 Social Television

As the long tradition of *audience research* has amply demonstrated, the social dimension of television viewing is not an invention of social media. The television content has always triggered informal conversations, becoming an object of discussion and also a symbolic marker of cultures and tastes. However, if in the pre-digital era the “discursivization” of digital content was done in limited physical spaces, not necessarily domestic but definitely not mediated by other technologies, with the spread of social media, this social dimension has started to become visible in the half-public contexts of Twitter and Facebook, taking on new connotations and opening the way for new expressive styles. Often television programs invite the public to comment via Twitter on the show in progress; this practice is often encouraged through publication of comments in subtitles or as integration into the content of the program itself, for example by including interviews conducted in studio, adding questions or suggestions from the public. Although this is a relatively new phenomenon, there are already many studies that have examined the forms of using Twitter as a real-time back-channel for sharing comments and ratings on television programs.

Collecting the tweets produced during the airing of the final episode of five successful American TV series (Bones, Castle, Law & Order SVU, The Mentalist, NCIS), Hart and Taylor (2012) observe that 76 % of the profiles included in the sample (composed of 13000 tweets sent 30 minutes before the start, 30 minutes after the start and 30 minutes after the conclusion) had only produced one tweet, while 1.4 % tweeted more than 11 times. Although the sampling strategies may be considered less sophisticated than those applied by other research that will be presented soon, we can see emerge the presence of a leading group which produces most of the tweets collected. The study of the type of tweets highlights that interactive dynamics represent a minor part of the overall communication flow. Only 11 % of the sample consists of direct messages to others; the remainder is made up of 28 % other tweets and 61 % of retweets with no obvious interactive dynamics. Other research shows how the patterns of communication change with different types of television programs. Doughty et al. (2012) found that conversations on entertainment programs show a lower level of reciprocity than those in which current affairs programs are discussed. In the first case, tweets often consist of messages addressed to celebrities on the program and show a configuration of vertical and centralized communication patterns; on the contrary, the conversations on current affairs programs appear more transversal and often tend to coagulate around small groups of contacts mutually connected.
What motivates users to participate in live-tweeting has been carefully inves-
tigated by Schirra, Sun and Bentley (2014). Their empirical research made use of
11 semi-structured interviews conducted on a sample of spectators of Downton
Abbey who were used to comment on Twitter during the broadcast. The results
highlighted that live-tweeting is a complex social process which is gradually con-
solidating a set of social conventions and shared habits. In addition, the research
investigated whether there is a link between social and personal feelings and
what kind of label is gradually emerging in the audience of the known television
series. For all participants, there are times when tweeting becomes a priority,
which usually coincide with plot twists or arcs between two episodes. The reasons
justifying the choice to participate in the live-tweeting can be grouped into three
main categories:

From the interviews it emerged that participation in live-tweeting is motivated
by three kinds of personal benefits. The first is about being part of a collective
experience. Participating on Twitter is like the pleasure that you experience while
going to the theatre or cinema with many other people who you don't know, but
with whom you share the same interest. Many point out that this sense of belong-
ing is strengthened by a constant presence on Twitter. Respondents perceive that
the attention of others is not taken for granted or automatically received but must
be won by personal participation and a timely experience of collective vision. For
others, the involvement in live-tweeting is a substitute for the shared domestic
habit of watching TV together, an experience they fail to have in real life for vari-
ous reasons. Finally, for many respondents it is a way to assert their views and
understand that they are shared by other spectators.

Although it does not relate exclusively to live-tweeting, the analysis of Macek
(2013) on the reasons that lead the public to participate in a more or less active
creation and redistribution of media content via web offers important insights for
understanding the symbolic and cultural dynamics involved in social television.
The specific practices on which his research is based are: the publication of user-
generated-content, the consumption of products and content posted by others
(both professional and amateur), the selection and redistribution of the content
posted by others. While recognizing the importance of the size and power of
its balance (or imbalance) in evaluating these textual practices of participatory
nature, Macek emphasizes that not all cultural and symbolic dynamics can be
explained by the logic of democratization. The decisive factor is rather the interest
in the performance of themselves and their culture of taste and consumption. The
object to share is not the content itself but rather a representation of their identity
and their life worlds. So, if the author agrees with the Jenkins (2006) who says
that these participatory practices are explained by the pleasure of consuming or challenging the discursive closure of a production, at the same time he suggests a broader perspective to seize two more orders of motivation. In light of his ethno-graphic research, Macek (2013) argues that the practices of selection, production and circulation of content can be attributed to three main logics: the desire for text, the desire for conformity, the desire to show off.

A large proportion of the current literature has focused on the communica-
tion patterns observed during live-tweeting. “Live-tweeting”, or the publication
of tweets during television programming, emerges as the majority declination of
*Social TV*. Among the various intersections between Twitter and live broadcasting,
Harrington et al. (2012) argue that the most relevant dimension corresponds to
the possibility to have a space for a “live” discussion, relatively non-mediated, in
relation with programs broadcast television. Users are able to offer their comments
transmitted simultaneously, to interact with other viewers who are engaged in
the same activity and, in some cases, to see their own comments becoming part
of the program itself.

Although the exchange of comments on television programs is not limited to
the time of broadcast, there is no doubt that the peak of conversations recorded
during the transmission represents a highly significant phenomenon, showing
that multiple dynamic enhancements converge. For spectators, connecting to
Twitter during a program means sharing real-time experience and therefore recre-
ating forms of collective sociability and synchronization of individual temporali-
ties, similar to what existed in the pre-digital era. The multiplication of devices
and distribution channels for television content is normally associated with a
growing individualisation of television time; the ability to customize in an ever
more consistent way their “media diet” means that the schedule no longer poses
a collective calendar capable of tuning practices and routines of daily life. Against
this backdrop of fragmentation and dispersion of television consumption, Twitter
seems to offer an opportunity for a turnaround. In fact, the platform of micro-
blogging promises to reassign to the synchronized TV consumption the added
value of a social dimension where experience can be shared and content can be
discursively enjoyed. On the other hand, this practice is strongly encouraged by
the broadcasters that, in a period of highly dispersed TV usage, feel a strong need
to create opportunities for convergence in order to make the public more easily
monitored and immediately translatable into more profit. In their study on live-
tweeting about the *Eurovision Song Contest*, Highfield et al (2012) point out the
differences in the patterns of activity, interaction and interconnection between
users that are members of the fan community and those that are attributable to
a general audience. According to the authors, the strategies and television pro-
ductions planning live-tweeting must take into account the fact that the greater
internal cohesion seen in the fan community can potentially result in a different
symbolic power to the detriment of the general public. The multiple connections
between individual fans, combined with the determination to influence the pro-
duction decisions, for example, can lead to a strategic and exclusive use of the
hashtags by which the rest of the public is excluded from live-tweeting. Shamma
et al. (2009) studied the use of Twitter during the presidential debates of 2008 and
found that the structure of live-tweeting can be used to predict the structure of the
program. However, the messages rarely summarize or discuss the content of the
debate; rather they describe the emotional reactions or the personal feedback on
the performance of the studio's guests. On the contrary, the quantitative research
on live-tweeting about *X Factor* created by Lochrie and Coulton (2012) showed
a stronger connection between the content of the program and the themes of
the tweets. According to the research by McPherson et al (2012), the comments
posted on Twitter by viewers of *Glee* offered live coverage of the storyline, and
their comments were expressions of appreciation or condemnation of what was
seen on the screen.

Research by Wohn and Na (2011) analyzed live-tweets associated with two
big media events: The speech in which Obama announced that he accepted the
Nobel Peace Prize, on October 9th, 2009 and an episode of the ABC talent show
“So You Think You Can Dance”, on air two days earlier. Inspired by the “uses
and gratifications approach”, the analysis classified the messages into two main
categories: objectivity/subjectivity of the message (in the form of fact or opinion)
and inbound/outbound (concerning something that happened to the author of
the tweet or within the context of the program/live-tweeting). The intersections
of these two categories are four types of messages: attention-seeking (an objec-
tive message through which the author of the tweet calls for public attention),
information (an objective message on the program without any subjective refer-
ence), emotion (a subjective message about the author of the tweet) and opinion
(a subjective message on the program).

In both the monitored live-tweeted events, the majority of messages collected
were opinions, immediately followed by emotional ones. Differences emerge be-
tween the other two categories; within the live-tweeting that accompanied the
broadcasting of Obama's speech, informational tweets took precedence over
attention-seeking, while in the case of the talent show the proportion was reversed.
This suggests that, in both cases, the prevailing frame is subjective and relates as
much to the program as to the author of the tweet. When the tone becomes objec-
tive, the tendency is focused on research rather than on providing information: this is clearly seen in live-tweeting around the talent show.

Despite the diversity of practices, the research presented here registers a common line in the relationship between the observed spontaneous creativity on Twitter and the matrix of the text that is typical for a television program. We have seen how, in conversational dynamics, the content of comments reflects the structure of the television text; grassroots inventiveness still moves within the binary symbolic text dictated by the quality of the product broadcast. Although the lack of comparative analyses between different cultural contexts doesn't allow us to consider the results reviewed here as representative of a wider phenomenon. The data collected are sufficient to show that Twitter is emerging as a complementary platform to other media, and that its symbolic value arises in a relationship of interdependence with more consolidated media, like the television platform.

## 10.3 Television in the tweets of EU candidates

In order to explore the possibility of contamination between Twitter and television, following on from the previous discussion, this chapter looks at the tweets produced by all candidates of the six parties that elected members of the European Parliament: the Democratic Party (Democratic Party), Forza Italia, Lista Tsipras, NCD (New Centre-Right), M5S (5 Stars Movement), and Lega Nord. Content analysis will indicate how important the topic “television” is in the tweets of the candidates during the election campaign, and what kind of programs were being talked about. Furthermore, we will see how this issue is handled and which functions the tweets about TV have.

We catalogued all the tweets of candidates who: *invited people to follow* a program in which a politician talks (before or during the program); *participated in and invited others to participate in live-tweeting* during a political information program; *reported the words said by a politician* during a TV broadcasting (tweeting live or after the program); *commented on* the TV speech of a politician: directly or through the retweet of another person; *spoke about a program of political information* in which candidates were featured; *commented on* themes, guests, presenter's style, performance of the actors; *cited and mentioned* a TV program (often using a retweet from the program account, sometimes with a hashtag or a quote).

### 10.3.1 The presence of the topic “television”

Many tweets about TV are related firstly to the activities of live-tweeting of the party and its members when their leader talks on television (the leader's most
significant sentences are tweeted and retweeted); candidates comment on the issues, the performance of politicians, the presenter's attitude. In some cases, they support their leader against their opponents.

Some leaders frequently comment on TV programs in which they are involved (then they are retweeted). For example, Matteo Salvini (leader of Lega Nord) is very active: among the 699 tweets by candidates of Lega Nord about TV, 121 are written by him and 85 are retweets of his tweets. Even a leader who is not used to taking part in TV programs, such as Beppe Grillo, leader of M5S, often comments TV on Twitter: among his tweets, 196 are about TV out of a total of 435 by all the Movement.

Many candidates also anticipate, comment and retweet their TV speeches. They often retweet messages of supporters, especially tweets of encouragement/ appreciation. Even M5S candidates like to comment TV speeches, but in this case dominant messages deal with critical views about the presenter and about the partiality of journalists (so called “newsagents”), sarcasm and attacks on opponents, according to the political style of movement. Finally, the habit of retweeting tweets of others – especially of the leaders and the party, but also of ordinary people – increases the number of total tweets.

<table><caption>Table 10.1: Number of tweets about television (and percentage of total tweets).</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Total tweets*</th><th>Tweets about TV</th><th>% of tweets about TV (on total tweets)*</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>FORZA ITALIA</td><td>19592</td><td>1401</td><td>7,15</td></tr><tr><td>THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY</td><td>14210</td><td>475</td><td>3,34</td></tr><tr><td>M5S</td><td>8790</td><td>435</td><td>4,95</td></tr><tr><td>LEGA NORD</td><td>7907</td><td>699</td><td>8,84</td></tr><tr><td>NCD</td><td>5433</td><td>318</td><td>5,85</td></tr><tr><td>TSIPRAS</td><td>4680</td><td>256</td><td>5,47</td></tr></tbody></table>

* The total tweets and the percentage of the total tweets referred to all the tweets made by all candidates in the party list

Among the tweets that talk about television, the percentage of retweets is: 75.2 % for Forza Italia; 69.7 % for M5S; 49.9 % for Lega Nord; 40.6 % for Tsipras; 32.7 % for NCD; 27.8 % for the Democratic Party.
### 10.3.2 The content of the tweets about TV

To examine the contents of the TV related tweets, we can give an example of the two most productive on social media: Forza Italia and the Democratic Party. They differ in the importance given to television, because Forza Italia is the second party for the space dedicated to TV (7.15 %), while the Democratic Party is the one that publishes the least tweets about it (3.34 %). First of all, we distinguish the programs mentioned by typology:

<table><caption>Table 10.2: The typology of the programs mentioned in the tweets</caption><thead><tr><th>Typology</th><th>Forza Italia</th><th>%</th><th>The Democratic Party</th><th>%</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Talk shows</td><td>599</td><td>42,8</td><td>200</td><td>42,1</td></tr><tr><td>Political current affairs and debates</td><td>296</td><td>21,1</td><td>129</td><td>27,2</td></tr><tr><td>TV news, breaking news (and journalistic programs)</td><td>364</td><td>26,0</td><td>87</td><td>18,3</td></tr><tr><td>Official Political Broadcasts, with a debate</td><td>15</td><td>1,1</td><td>9</td><td>1,9</td></tr><tr><td>General information (not political)</td><td>109</td><td>7,8</td><td>40</td><td>8,4</td></tr><tr><td>Candidates debates in English language/programs by foreign broadcasters</td><td>18</td><td>1,3</td><td>10</td><td>2,1</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>1401</td><td>100</td><td>475</td><td>100</td></tr></tbody></table>

Talk show programs are the most cited, with similar percentages for the two parties (around 42 %). Those programs are very popular and broadcast on national television in prime time ("Announo", "Ballarò", "Piazza Pulita", "Virus", "La Gabbia") and the well-known talk show, "Porta a Porta", is broadcast in the late evening on RAI 1. All the shows talk about news and often host politicians. During the European campaign, the coverage about politics was extensive and the participation of the leaders wide, which inspired many tweets (in particular Silvio Berlusconi's appearances on TV).
<table><caption>Table 10.3: The contents of the tweets about TV</caption><thead><tr><th>Contents of the tweets</th><th>The Democratic Party</th><th></th><th>Forza Italia</th><th></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Announcement of a TV speech of a politician, invitation to see it ("follow me on Rai 1 at 10pm")</td><td>149</td><td>31,4</td><td>292</td><td>20,8</td></tr><tr><td>Comment of the candidate on a TV program</td><td>39</td><td>8,2</td><td>71</td><td>5,1</td></tr><tr><td>Comment of the candidate on TV and on a network in general</td><td>27</td><td>5,7</td><td>5</td><td>0,4</td></tr><tr><td>Comment by a viewer of the program (RT)</td><td>33</td><td>6,9</td><td>257</td><td>18,3</td></tr><tr><td>Quotes of the text of a politician's intervention in a program - by the candidate</td><td>134</td><td>28,2</td><td>81</td><td>5,8</td></tr><tr><td>Quotes of the text of a politician's intervention in a program - by a viewer (RT)</td><td>20</td><td>4,2</td><td>67</td><td>4,8</td></tr><tr><td>Quotes of the text of a politician's intervention in a program - by the party or its leaders (RT)</td><td>0</td><td>0,0</td><td>446</td><td>31,8</td></tr><tr><td>Quotes of the text of a politician's intervention in a program - by the presenter or a TV account (RT)</td><td>25</td><td>5,3</td><td>93</td><td>6,6</td></tr><tr><td>Quote or comment about a foreign program (and about the TV duel)</td><td>6</td><td>1,3</td><td>17</td><td>1,2</td></tr><tr><td>Polls and statistics</td><td>3</td><td>0,6</td><td>9</td><td>0,6</td></tr><tr><td>Link to a video of a politician's intervention in a program</td><td>12</td><td>2,5</td><td>27</td><td>1,9</td></tr><tr><td>Parts of a current affairs program about the candidates</td><td>13</td><td>2,7</td><td>6</td><td>0,4</td></tr><tr><td>Parts of a TV information program about elections</td><td>0</td><td>0,0</td><td>4</td><td>0,3</td></tr><tr><td>Parts of a current affairs program commented by the candidate</td><td>5</td><td>1,1</td><td>7</td><td>0,5</td></tr><tr><td>Comments on the program "Porta a porta" with Beppe Grillo</td><td>9</td><td>1,9</td><td>19</td><td>1,4</td></tr><tr><td>Total tweets about TV</td><td>475</td><td>100</td><td>1401</td><td>100</td></tr></tbody></table>

If we consider the contents, most of the tweets of the Democratic Party on TV are about the announcement of a TV speech of a politician ("tomorrow at 21, follow me at Ballarò") and the quote, by the candidate, of the text of a politician's intervention in a program (the politician can be the candidate himself or a main personality
of the same party or of another party). These tweets are quite often produced by
the candidate. Also the third most present content, the *comment of the candidate
on a TV program*, was due to him, without retweets.

The first two topics present in the tweets of Forza Italia on TV are the result of retweets: *comments by a viewer of the program* (example: “RT @coachjoetod: @comilara always polite in her speeches #SkyTG24”) and *quotes of the text of a politician’s intervention in a program – by the party or its leaders*. Also the third topic stated, *the announcement of a TV speech*, contains more than a half of the total number of retweets (134). Therefore the candidates of Forza Italia retweet frequently, especially the comments of the viewers: retweets of sympathizers, ordinary people, journalistic friends of politicians. The effect is “giving voice to the people” and promoting the image of the candidate (many of the tweets are accolades). When Forza Italia politicians pronounce speeches on TV, they are tweeted by official accounts of the party and Silvio Berlusconi, and retweeted a lot by the candidates, with an amplifying effect. There are candidates who do nothing more than this type of RT.

10.4 Case analysis: interview with Beppe Grillo, leader of the M5S

10.4.1 The argumentative plan

The second part of the analysis examined, in parallel, the discursive dynamics of
the content of a TV current affairs program, and the content of the live-tweeting
generated by the program itself. In particular, the episode of “Porta a Porta” broad-
cast on 19th May 2014, which hosted the leader of the M5S, Beppe Grillo, was
analyzed. The content analysis took into account, on the one hand, the spectrum
of the topics; on the other hand, the argumentative functions of each interaction
between the anchorman and the politician. Content analysis was applied both
to the text of the show, and to the tweets produced before, after and during the
show: the tweets collected as part of the project (namely those with the hashtag
#portaaporta) were integrated by tweets collected by the Osservatorio di Pavia
using, as search keys, some specific hashtags from the interview (in particular,
#vespachiedi and #grilloinvespa), and those addressing the Twitter account of
Beppe Grillo (@BeppeGrillo). While not directly a candidate in the European
Elections, Beppe Grillo was, in fact, the only member of the Movement who had
national exposure during the election period, due to the lack of fame of the official
candidates of M5S running for the European Elections. Despite a lack of national
debates between the main political leaders on European issues, the television
campaign in Italy featured individually-hosted interviews with the leaders of the main parties.

The content analysis and the argumentative flow of the interview highlighted the following dynamics:

* The functional, argumentative and teleological perspective of the interaction (in essence, the communicative purpose pursued by the political actor through his/her arguments).

* The thematic perspective of the argument: the subject of each interaction was detected, and a macro-theme was associated with each subject (in particular, the traditional distinction between *Policy*, *Political*, and *Personal Campaign*, applied by Patterson (1980), among others), in order to contextualize the data about the quality of the argumentative flow.

The coding form has been applied to each unit of classification, identified as a continuous flow of interaction characterized by uniformity in functions and thematics.

The content analysis of the program identified the ways in which the argumentative flow in television affects comments on Twitter, both from the point of view of the issues addressed, and from the point of view of quality and methods of argumentation.

Moreover, since the personal point of view of the Twitter users about Beppe Grillo and the M5S was coded for (*positive*, *negative* and *neutral*), we tried to understand how the opinion of those who tweeted about the TV program influenced the passage of the themes and the argumentative methods from the TV flow to the virtual agora.

Below, you will find some results of content analysis applied to the interview.

<table><caption>Table 10.4: Analysis of the content of the program “Porta a Porta” of May 19: functional analysis, and teleological argument (percentages on the total number of words)</caption><tr><td>Presentation of the program of the Movement</td><td>41.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of values and principles of the Movement</td><td>20.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the strategies of alliance of the Movement</td><td>6.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Opinion about political life (governmental or legislative) of an opponent</td><td>5.5 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the experience of civil commitment of Beppe Grillo</td><td>5.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Opinion about the program of the opposite parties</td><td>4.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Discussion about internal problems in the Movement</td><td>4.5 %</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>Presentation of the professional experience of Beppe Grillo</td><td>3.6 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the personality of Beppe Grillo</td><td>3.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Discussion about the campaign run by Beppe Grillo</td><td>1.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Discussion of the relation between Beppe Grillo and the media</td><td>1.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the personality of an opponent</td><td>1.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of results of the political coalition at the national level</td><td>0.5 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>100.0 %</strong></td></tr></table>

The prevalence of a programmatic point of view is due to the presenter Bruno Vespa, who repeatedly brought the discussion onto the feasibility of policy and political proposals of the M5S. Vespa, therefore, put together an “aggressive” strategy, with topics less favourable to the Movement, such as *strategies of alliance* (the political struggle of M5S is founded on the rejection of any political or tactical agreement with all the other parties) and *relations within the Movement* (many expulsions from the Parliamentary group of M5S occurred in the first months of Legislature).

Nevertheless, Grillo was often able to bring the discursive focus into a more advantageous field: the illustration of the identity and of the values of M5S, particularly “honesty”, “participation”, and some proposals concerning the fight against corruption.

<table><caption>Table 10.5: Analysis of the content of the program “Porta a Porta” of May 19th: thematic analysis, micro-themes (percentages of the total number of words)</caption><tr><td>Euro, European Charts</td><td>18.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Industrial policy, industrial development, production problems</td><td>12.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Financing of the basic income for each citizens</td><td>10.5 %</td></tr><tr><td>Ideology, reference values of the party or of the alliance</td><td>8.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>Fight against corruption</td><td>7.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Intra-party relations</td><td>4.5 %</td></tr><tr><td>Political history of somebody else</td><td>4.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>Privatizations</td><td>3.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>The cost of the policy</td><td>3.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>Tourism</td><td>3.3 %</td></tr><tr><td>Welfare (its importance, its defense, its reduction)</td><td>3.1 %</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>Immigration</td><td>3.0 %</td></tr><tr><td>Institutional Reforms</td><td>2.5 %</td></tr><tr><td>Quality of the campaign</td><td>2.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>The media's role in Italian politics</td><td>2.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>The values, ideals referred by the interviewee</td><td>1.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Environment, energy policy</td><td>1.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Other issues</td><td>6.0 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>100.0 %</strong></td></tr></table>

Concerning the macro-themes, we can see how policies have occupied almost three-quarters of the interview, followed by political issues. Strangely, for an interview with a popular character, with a rich TV past (Beppe Grillo was a famous standing comedian, before his political engagement), and for a face-to-face during European Elections campaign, personal topics and topics of the campaign have only been marginally addressed: a confirmation of how Bruno Vespa has tried to keep the interview in the terms of pure political practice: certainly, policies are not the easiest battlefield for the leader of M5S, who is much more comfortable with paradoxical monologues, and with using personal comic skills as polemical weapons against contenders.

<table><caption>Table 10.6: Analysis of the content of the program “Porta a Porta” of May 19th: thematic analysis, macro-themes (percentages on the total number of words)</caption><tr><td>Policy</td><td>71.3 %</td></tr><tr><td>Political</td><td>13.3 %</td></tr><tr><td>Personal</td><td>7.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Campaign</td><td>7.6 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>100.0 %</strong></td></tr></table>

### 10.4.2 The flow of tweets

A content analysis was also applied to 1628 tweets randomly chosen from the total flow about the program. The tweet sample was examined on the basis of a coding table similar to the one used to analyze the program, identifying functional and thematic aspects of each tweet. Furthermore, we added an “appraisal variable” to the coding scheme, which collects the explicit position of the author of the tweet about Beppe Grillo or about the M5S.
<table><caption>Table 10.7: Content analysis of the tweets regarding the “Porta a Porta” talk show of May 19th: functional analysis (percentages of total tweets analyzed)</caption><tr><td>Comments on the program, performing analysis of Beppe Grillo</td><td>55.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the M5S program</td><td>19.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the personality of the guest</td><td>9.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Promoting the values and ideals of M5S</td><td>6.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>Absent or undetectable</td><td>4.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Comments about political life (governmental or legislative) of an opponent</td><td>1.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Comments about the program of the opposite alliance</td><td>1.6 %</td></tr><tr><td>Other functions</td><td>1.4 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>100 %</strong></td></tr></table>

It may be noted that most of the tweets are designed to produce general opinions, sheer evaluations about Beppe Grillo's performance during the interview (judgments, therefore, not involving evaluations on the Movement and its leader, and not concerning single political proposals), about reviews of the show, about the choices of the questions, or about specific moments of the interview; “break your leg” tweets and mere tweets of encouragement are also massively present: M5S's militants were aware that their *leader* would be acting in a hostile communicative context. The first peak of tweets, before the start of the broadcast interview (which was not live but shortly deferred) was inspired by the publication on Twitter of the *selfie* that Bruno Vespa shot with Beppe Grillo before the-face-to face interview started.

When the show went ahead, however, the number of tweets grew expressing doubts about the ability of Beppe Grillo to communicate effectively in a format such as the face-to-face interview, posted by the opponents of the Movement. Supporters of M5S, however, noted how the host, for once, was playing the role of a “true” investigative journalist (Bruno Vespa is often accused of complicity with his political guests).

The first relevant result, then, is that most of the tweets are not directly linked to the content of the program. They are not tied to specific themes or arguments, but they are pure evaluations about the performance of Beppe Grillo, and simple notes about the program.

Nonetheless, we can find a correlation between the other functional aspects targeted by the tweets, and the functional aspects detected in the interview: a prevalence of tweets aimed to *highlight aspects of the program of M5S* addressed in
the interview, followed by tweets commenting on *Grillo's personality*, and tweets about *political values* of the Movement.

<table><caption>Table 10.8: Content analysis of tweets related to the talk show “Porta a Porta” of May the 19th: functional analysis crossed with the explicit evaluation expressed on Beppe Grillo or M5S (percentages of total tweets analyzed)</caption><thead><tr><th>Function</th><th>Neutral</th><th>Positive</th><th>Negative</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Comments on the program, performing analysis of Beppe Grillo</td><td>29.2 %</td><td>38.1 %</td><td>32.6 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of program M5S</td><td>9.9 %</td><td>18.0 %</td><td>72.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Presentation of the personality of the guest</td><td>2.0 %</td><td>8.1 %</td><td>89.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Promoting the values and ideals of M5S</td><td>9.6 %</td><td>62.5 %</td><td>27.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Absent or undetectable</td><td>69.6 %</td><td>21.7 %</td><td>8.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Comments about political life (governmental or legislative) of an opponent</td><td>3.6 %</td><td>78.6 %</td><td>17.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Comments about the program of the opposite alliance</td><td>11.5 %</td><td>84.6 %</td><td>3.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Other functions</td><td>0.0 %</td><td>45.5 %</td><td>54.5 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>22.2 %</strong></td><td><strong>33.8 %</strong></td><td><strong>44.0 %</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>

NOTE: The information highlighted indicates the percentages which are furthest away from the distribution of the evaluation, and that, therefore, indicate statistically significant concentrations of positive and negative feedbacks.

Crossing the functional aspect with the commentators' ratings about Beppe Grillo and about M5S and its political actions, highlights the following points of interest:

* Comments on performance and on the program are slightly over-represented among positive commentators.

* Tweets about *the policy proposals of M5S* and about *the personality of Beppe Grillo*, show a strong over-representation of negative feedback for Beppe Grillo and M5S: 72 % of the tweets that comment the political proposal of M5S bring negative opinions, against 44 % of the total negative opinions. Criticism of the political action of the Movement, therefore, is focused on programmatic aspects and on the personality of the leader. In particular, commenters criticized the political positions of Beppe Grillo about immigration, deemed too vague and ambiguous, especially by right-wing voters, and, in particular, those of the Lega Nord, or deemed too similar to those of the Right by liberal and progressive voters.
* Commenters also strongly criticized *European policy and industrial policy* of M5S: in particular, these issues, and the paradoxical way Grillo debated them, have massively attracted the sarcasm of detractors. Even tweets aimed to review the personality of Beppe Grillo were negative: mainly, tweets can be found which denounce the heaviness of Grillo's communication style out of his natural context (the stand-up comedian "one man show"), and tweets that denounce his vulgarity. Conversely, tweets that appreciated his personality underline its "authenticity" and forthrightness, which should be read as variations of his "honesty" and his moral rectitude.

* Among the tweets aimed to emphasize *the values of M5S*, and among those aimed at *criticizing the government's action* and the political programs of the opponents, the tweets by M5S supporters prevail. These data tend to confirm the substantial difference between M5S and other movements inspired by populism (as the Lega Nord in Italy): while the latter support their political action on a few specific policy proposals, especially related to immigration and tax system reform, the former bases its identity on the moral issue, claimed as foundational to every political proposal, and on deep criticism of "old politics", portrayed as being influenced by large lobbies against the interests of citizens. An "ontological difference" proudly claimed by the militants of the Movement, which justifies and dwarfs any possible uncertainty shown by the leader (and even recognized by some militants) about mere programmatic aspects of the policy proposed by M5S.

<table><caption>Table 10.9: Content analysis of tweets related to the talk show "Porta a Porta" of May 19th: thematic analysis (percentages of total tweets analyzed)</caption><tr><td>Findings on performance in the televised debate</td><td>59.6%</td></tr><tr><td>Slogan, voting intentions</td><td>6.4%</td></tr><tr><td>Jokes about political opponents</td><td>5.8%</td></tr><tr><td>Fight against corruption</td><td>5.7%</td></tr><tr><td>Industrial policy, industrial development, production problems</td><td>3.3%</td></tr><tr><td>Euro, European Charts</td><td>2.8%</td></tr><tr><td>Hypothesis of results</td><td>2.2%</td></tr><tr><td>Quality of the campaign</td><td>1.5%</td></tr><tr><td>Immigration</td><td>1.4%</td></tr><tr><td>Consequences of the elections on institutional arrangements</td><td>1.3%</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>Financing of basic income</td><td>1.3 %</td></tr><tr><td>Intra-party relations</td><td>0.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Environment, energy policy</td><td>0.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Institutional Reforms</td><td>0.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Military spending</td><td>0.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Other issues</td><td>4.4 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>100.0 %</strong></td></tr></table>

As for the specific issues faced by those who commented on the interview with Beppe Grillo via Twitter, in addition to tweets that contain only a judgment about the quality of the TV debate, we also detected a strong presence of slogans and voting intentions (with a prevalence of endorsement in favor of M5S and Beppe Grillo), and jokes about political opponents: in particular, jokes on Beppe Grillo by opponents of the Movement (the majority), and jokes on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi by militants of M5S.

Among the programmatic issues, some prevail, like fighting corruption, industrial policy, and European policy. The subjects and feedback cross-distribution confirms that some issues were mainly used to carry negative judgments on the proposed policy of M5S (industrial policy, European policy, immigration and citizen's income: the latter, in particular, because of the lack of clarity with which Grillo has exposed the covering of his costs).

Conversely, the most frequent topics by supporters of the Movement were fighting corruption and the proposal to reduce military spending, the latter being the key proposal to mobilize funding for the basic citizens' income. If you compare this distribution with the topics addressed during the TV interview, it is obvious that the agenda of the audience has proved slightly different from the agenda of the presenter: the main theme of the interview, the relation of M5S with Europe, with its Charts and its Institutions, was very scarcely taken into account by commentators on Twitter (the issue of Europe has been addressed by 2.8 % of the tweets of the sample, while occupied nearly one-fifth of the interview: a further proof of the little interest that European issues have for Italians); vice-versa, it has been virtually ignored by the militants and supporters of M5S.

The comments about the proposals of M5S for the fight against corruption, however, was over-represented on Twitter: recognized by the militants as the main theme of identity of their political proposal, it was the most commented policy subject on Twitter, while, during the interview, it occupied less than a tenth of the total space.
<table><caption>Table 10.10: Analysis of the content of tweets related to the talk show “Porta a Porta” of May 19th: thematic analysis crossed with explicit evaluation expressed on Beppe Grillo or M5S (percentages of total tweets analyzed)</caption><thead><tr><th>Theme</th><th>Neutral</th><th>Positive</th><th>Negative</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Findings on performance in face-to-face debate</td><td>29.1 %</td><td>27.3 %</td><td>43.6 %</td></tr><tr><td>Slogan, voting intentions</td><td>2.9 %</td><td>80.0 %</td><td>17.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Jokes about political opponents</td><td>15.8 %</td><td>30.5 %</td><td>53.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Fight against corruption</td><td>4.3 %</td><td>76.3 %</td><td>19.4 %</td></tr><tr><td>Industrial policy, industrial development, production problems</td><td>5.6 %</td><td>18.5 %</td><td>75.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Euro, European Charts</td><td>24.4 %</td><td>24.4 %</td><td>51.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Hypothesis of results</td><td>11.1 %</td><td>38.9 %</td><td>50.0 %</td></tr><tr><td>Quality of the campaign</td><td>25.0 %</td><td>29.2 %</td><td>45.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Immigration</td><td>4.5 %</td><td>18.2 %</td><td>77.3 %</td></tr><tr><td>Consequences of the elections on institutional arrangements</td><td>19.0 %</td><td>14.3 %</td><td>66.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Financing of basic income</td><td>0.0 %</td><td>4.8 %</td><td>95.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Intra-party relations</td><td>0.0 %</td><td>33.3 %</td><td>66.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Environment, energy policy</td><td>28.6 %</td><td>35.7 %</td><td>35.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Institutional Reforms</td><td>8.3 %</td><td>25.0 %</td><td>66.7 %</td></tr><tr><td>Military spending</td><td>14.3 %</td><td>42.9 %</td><td>42.9 %</td></tr><tr><td>Other topics</td><td>11.1 %</td><td>47.2 %</td><td>41.7 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>22.2 %</strong></td><td><strong>33.8 %</strong></td><td><strong>44.0 %</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>

NOTE: The information highlighted indicates the percentages which are furthest away from the marginal distribution of the evaluation, and that, therefore, indicate statistically significant concentrations of positive and negative feedback.

Finally, the analysis of the macro-tweets gives us the following results:

* The low incidence of *personal issues* in the comments: also in this case, through the analysis of the tweets we have the confirmation of the fact that the M5S is an “atypical” charismatic movement, compared, for example, to the first steps of Forza Italia by Berlusconi; it is a movement in which the presence of the leader is secondary in the construction of the identity, which is based, above all, on ideals and values.
* The relevance of the *themes of the campaign* in contrast with the importance given to them during the interview; in particular, as mentioned, the analysis has detected a large presence of election slogans and forecast polls.

* The lack of importance given by commentators to *political relations*, however, seems natural, given the simplification imposed by the leadership of the movement to the internal relations of M5S itself, and to the relations between parties, which are virtually absent in the political action of the Movement.

<table><caption>Table 10.11: Analysis of the content of tweets related to the program “Porta a Porta” of May 19th: thematic analysis, macro-themes (percentages of total of the tweets analyzed)</caption><tr><td>Meta debate</td><td>60.5 %</td></tr><tr><td>Policy</td><td>19.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Campaign</td><td>17.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Political</td><td>3.1 %</td></tr><tr><td>Personal</td><td>0.1 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>100.0 %</strong></td></tr></table>

Crossing the distribution of macro-themes with the feedback of commentators on M5S, shows an over-representation of negative feedback in tweets about policy and political relations (related, mainly, to issues of dissent within M5S), and an over-representation of positive feedback on the *themes of the campaign*, because of the number of slogans and voting endorsements by militants present in the sample.

<table><caption>Table 10.12: Analysis of the content of tweets related to the talk show “Porta a Porta” of May 19th: macro-themes analysis crossed with evaluate explicitly expressed on Beppe Grillo or M5S (percentages of total tweets analyzed)</caption><thead><tr><td>Theme</td><td>Neutral</td><td>Positive</td><td>Negative</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Meta-debate</td><td>29.8 %</td><td>27.1 %</td><td>43.0 %</td></tr><tr><td>Policy</td><td>10.3 %</td><td>39.9 %</td><td>49.8 %</td></tr><tr><td>Campaign</td><td>10.7 %</td><td>51.1 %</td><td>38.2 %</td></tr><tr><td>Political</td><td>12.0 %</td><td>30.0 %</td><td>58.0 %</td></tr><tr><td>Personal</td><td>0.0 %</td><td>50.0 %</td><td>50.0 %</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>22.2 %</strong></td><td><strong>33.8 %</strong></td><td><strong>44.0 %</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>
NOTE: The information highlighted indicate the percentages which are furthest away from the marginal distribution of the evaluation, and, therefore, indicate statistically significant concentrations of positive and negative feedback.

### 10.4.3 Thematic trend

<figure><img src="image_61.png" /><figcaption>Chart 1: the time course of the space devoted to the various macro-themes within the TV-show</figcaption></figure>

With this series of charts, we tried to investigate the relation between the time trend of macro-themes in the debate, and the time course of the same in the comment on Twitter. The *Chart 1*, in fact, describes diachronically the amount of space dedicated to each of the macro-themes in the course of the program. The initial phase devoted primarily to *personal issues and campaign issues* (build especially on questions about the possible political consequences at national level of a victory of M5S in the European Elections), has followed by a section mainly devoted to political relations (in particular, to some questions by Vespa on banishment by the parliamentary groups of some members of M5S, following positions or behaviours deemed inconsistent with the regulations of the Movement). Then, the whole central part of the program is dedicated to policy issues. Finally, the last section goes back to personal themes and the themes of the campaign.

Chart 2, on the other hand, describes the diachronic evolution of macro-themes in the debate on Twitter. Chart 3, finally, shows the same data as Chart 2,
purified, however, by the “noise” made up of the tweets containing jokes or mere comments about the TV debate.

When comparing the different temporal trends, the following considerations become apparent:

* The argumentative trend in the show produced *an explosion of tweets dedicated to issues of policy* by commentators, virtually absent before the show started. The end of the interview resulted – as you can see by reading the charts 2 and 3 – in a visible decline of attention by commentators about economic issues and, more, about the management of public affairs. However, policy issues were significantly present in the tweets related to the program until the end of the survey. Therefore, it can be said that the interview, and, in particular, the care with which Bruno Vespa tried to maintain the focus on concrete proposals, have in part prompted the attention of commentators (especially commentators against M5S) on the policy proposals of the Movement.

* Before the show started, the themes of the campaign were prevailing, in particular *endorsements* and voting intentions; the number of this type of tweets declined sharply during the show, to return to a quite significant level after the end of the show.

* The tweets about the “meta-debate”, about the whole discourse on the TV face-to-face debate and the type of media, reach a peak just before starting the show (tweets of “break your leg” to the leader), and always remain the most of the total tweets, but another peak appears just after the end, with the final assessments on the “final result” of the face-to-face.

* The *personal topics* in the program were almost entirely absent from the flow of the tweets: they emerge – in a very marginal percentage – only at the end of the interview, with a few comments about the supposed economic benefit that Grillo would gain from the management of the Movement’s official blog, as a direct result of his political commitment.

* The tweets about *political relations* (in particular, as mentioned, those related to the management of internal relations in M5S) experienced a peak at the exact time of the question by the presenter during the interview. After that, the issue regained interest among commentators just after the conclusion of the debate, always accompanied with observations on the mode of administration of internal relations in M5S. Again, you can see a very clear correlation between the development of the topic in the program and the development of the organization of the comments on Twitter.
<figure><img src="image_62.png" /><figcaption>Chart 3: the time course of the space dedicated to different macro-themes in the show without the tweets related to the development of the face-to-face on TV.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_63.png" /></figure>
## 10.5 Conclusions

TV occupies an important place in the tweets of the candidates during the election campaign. As described in the content analysis of the tweets posted by the candidates of Forza Italia and the Democratic Party, the talk-show programs are among the most commented. When they speak about TV, all six parties examined often reproduce the content of the program (mainly, the statements of politicians) or announce its airing: Twitter therefore has a function of *amplification* and *multiplication* of the political message conveyed through the medium of television. This is particularly the case when the party leaders attend the TV show: the accounts of both candidates and the related parties are mobilized to spread the message already broadcast on TV. The television appearances of Silvio Berlusconi, during which we recorded the most significant cases of live-tweeting, are an example of this. The function of *propagation/multiplication* of the messages delivered on TV becomes clear when we focus on retweet rates: for three out of six parties, retweets represent the majority of the tweets produced (77.2 % for Forza Italia). In order to amplify and disseminate slogans and statements that leaders produce during TV shows, the candidates of the same party often re-tweet what was published during the airing from the broadcaster's account, from the Twitter profile of their own party and from the account of their leader. This is especially true in cases of leaders who are very present on social media and TV, such as Salvini and Berlusconi, or in the case of Grillo and the M5S. We can say that live-tweeting is linked to the functions of amplification, recovery and retransmission of the message delivered via TV, and of comments about it, rather than as discursive or dialogic enrichment of the contents conveyed through television. In this first part of the analysis, Twitter therefore emerges as a discursive space, complementary and subordinated to the television arena. The communication dynamics that take place here do not differ in some ways from the paradigm of mass media broadcasters; on the contrary, they work to enhance the diffusion capacity of the traditional electronic mass media, bringing each node in the "Twitter-sphere" to act as a megaphone of messages spread through television.

The second part of the analysis has enabled us to focus on the counterpoint of this phenomenon: if the communication strategies activated on Twitter by candidates remain firmly anchored in the mass media paradigm, what happens instead in large conversational flows, powered by spectators and citizens? Are there opposing forces that offset, mitigate, or even reverse the trend? Our data show that, even in this case, the television arena has a decisive dragging capacity of the discursive dynamics taking place on Twitter, in relation to both content and expressive forms. However, when the gaze is extended beyond the strategies
of the candidates to capture the wider communication flows, the dependence
of Twitter on television takes on specific features that are a direct result of the
cultural conventions that are established on the micro-blogging platform. The
flow of the content published and redistributed on Twitter finds an important
filter in the needs of self-representation and self-positioning that arise from the
increasingly widespread practice of “curation” and “management” of social pro-
files (Marwick & Boyd, 2010; p. 2012). In particular, the analysis has shown a
correlation between the effectiveness with which the Guest has treated the themes
proposed by the Host of the TV show, the resumption of the themes themselves by
commentators on Twitter, and their political positioning. In fact, what happened
was that the self-declared supporters of the M5S enhanced with their tweets the
constitutive issues of the movement – as for political corruption – while aban-
doning the subject areas of policy and economy (the main issue in the program),
with which the Guest had more difficulties. The latter area was on the contrary
taken up, revived and highlighted almost exclusively by detractors of the move-
ment, who turned the same weapons against Beppe Grillo that the leader of M5S
pointed at political opponents: irony, sarcasm, and accusations of inadequacy
and incompetence. At the same time, a large slice of tweets targeted the televi-
sion performance of the leader, emphasizing some strong and weak points of his
communicative effectiveness, instead of focusing on the content of the program
or on the covered topics. Only on the ground of this performative assessment
did opponents and supporters converge in a direct confrontation. Otherwise, if
the thematic focus was prevalent, discursive flows were characterized by a strong
polarization: the commentators on Twitter who dealing with the political content
of the program, basically, occupied the most useful areas to argue and justify
their positions against or in support of the political leader, while avoiding a real
dialogue with opponents.

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Fernando Bonete Vizcaino, Elena Cebrián Guinovart &
Tamara Vázquez Barrio (CEU Madrid)

# 11. Pablo Iglesias' Tweeting Style: Unsuccessfully Aspiring to Renew Spanish Political Discourse

**Abstract**

This chapter analyses Pablo Iglesias' tweeting style during the European campaign and the quality of his attempts to establish a dialogue with citizens, suggesting that Podemos' new message, based on being closer to citizens' concerns and the increase of participation, is not necessarily reflected in its leader's conduct on Twitter.

## 11.1 Introduction

The left-wing reformist party *Podemos* erupted on the Spanish political scene in January 2014 with a promise of renewal. The economic crisis and the strong laws passed by the government to tackle it, subsequent unemployment and the numerous corruption scandals affecting Spanish political parties have served these last few years as precursors for the birth of numerous social movements and political parties demanding deep change in the way politics is understood. The answers *Podemos* gave to these requests, based on a constitutional reform that suited the vast majority of them, linked the party with the new social and political spirit. Furthermore, since its arrival on the Spanish scene, the party has been associated with a young, fresh, dynamic form of doing politics. Its direct and aggressive discourse was initially reinforced by the massive success of the Coalition of the Radical Left SYRIZA in Greece (The Economist, 2014), which equally targeted people's wariness to the same old message from traditional Spanish parties and their inner corruption, and provided Podemos with an outstanding opportunity to portray itself as an emergent party in the context of the European Elections. That was understood days after the elections by The New York Times, which interpreted *Podemos'* success as follows: "Given the deep unpopularity of Spain's mainstream politicians, the endemic corruption exposed by the financial crisis and the pain felt by the 26 percent of the work force still unemployed despite hints of recovery, politicians and analysts are taking the threat posed by *Podemos* seriously" (Rapahel Minder, 2014).
Indeed, *Podemos* soon received strong media coverage. Over and after the campaign, the media placed great emphasis on the authenticity of *Podemos'* social networks activity, because it was supposedly a faithful reflection of its new-look proposals. Thus, for instance, Spanish and left-wing national newspaper Público stated "the main key of this social media whirlwind is to make citizens protagonsists, not the other way around, like the rest of parties usually do, because they understand social networks as an eminently unidirectional tool" (David Bolero, 2014). This publication also considered *Podemos* as the most constant and participative political party in social networks, truly open when creating and establishing a dialogue with citizens. The degree to which some of these claims by the media are representative of reality is something that will be shown here, especially because the media hype was enhanced the day after the elections, when the hashtag "Pablo Iglesias" achieved the first position on the Spanish top ranking of Twitter's Trending Topic list (Trendinalia, 2014).

The category NGO reflects a will to debate social affairs. Finally, retweets categorized as Citizen imply a disposition for dialogue with the general public, the electors. A last category called Other includes any other type not covered by the above.

When talking about Intention, we have established the following categories for every tweet or retweet: "Visibility of the Politician", "Live Tweeting of a Political Act" and "Advertising Achievements", on one hand; "Ideological Discourse", "Proposal", "Critical Message" and "Defensive Message", on the other. Tweets categorized within the first three are considered as low quality messages in terms of participation. They are focused on @Pablo_Iglesias_' self-promotion. The last four appear to be considerably more promising as far as they set up an ideological bulwark that may propitiate political debates. Personalization of politics, a further category called "Human Side", has been also taken into consideration, being matched as a form of low quality participation. The category "Call for Action" represents @Pablo_Iglesias_' requests to his supporters, and the quality in terms of participation depends on his sollicitations, which could either be self-promoting petitions or requests for citizens' opinion. Moreover, every tweet with a specific aim not listed above has been classified as Other.

In order to note the theme, we followed the same procedure for all tweets and retweets, using the categories employed by the Spanish public opinion research organism Centro Superior de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS): 20 categories that we had previously split into two different macro-types based on political participation. The first group includes 16 themes related to political engagement that may represent valuable political interaction. It is the case of "National, International and Regional Politics", "Economy", "Employment", "Population", "Envi-
ronment”, “Housing”, “Health”, “Justice”, “Science and Technology”, “Education”, “Social Problems”, “Media”, “Culture”, “Sports” and “Ideology”. The second group incorporates three topics, “Political Activity”, “Political Leader” and “Electoral Campaign”, all of them linked to political theatricals. By contrast, these three categories are likely to represent trivial political participation. The remaining category has been called “Other” to note any other theme not listed above.

The use of hashtags and mentions has been approached not only to quantify them, but to evaluate whether @Pablo_Iglesias_ is using these resources to create or maintain a dialogue (a new debate or a pre-existing one, mentioning users or topics placed outside his party), to call upon electors to take part in a certain action or to ask them for their support or, on the contrary, whether he uses hashtags and mentions as a repeated source of promotion (mentioning only what provides more visibility to his proposals). We have followed the same method when taking into account links. Apart from knowing their number, we evaluate which ones have enriched political discourse by considering their contribution to the debate.

Retweets, favourites and comments received by @Pablo_Iglesias_ in all of his tweets have been also considered, though they give us few clues about his interaction. The keys about real interaction have been obtained with the second part of the analysis: the 527 responses sent on 8th, 15th and 22nd of May. We have distinguished between conversations, when Pablo Iglesias replies to users, and comments, when users respond to @Pablo_Iglesias_ but they do not receive a reply from him. Both cases are evaluated and categorized: even when the politician does not reply to public opinion received, comments are still instances in which the public expresses its political concerns and aspirations.

The categories employed in this case are Authorship, Theme, Intention and Quality. Authorship and Theme follow the same parameters applied in the analysis of @Pablo_Iglesias_’ tweets. Those comments in which we have found a clear intention have been categorized as “Favourable”, “Unfavourable”, “Neutral” or “Question”, depending on the reaction showed when facing the politician tweets. Not only have we described the content of the tweets written by the users, but we have also measured their quality according to *consistency* with the theme of the original tweet posted by the politician, and *relevance*, when a comment raises or addresses a politically main issue.

## 11.2 Tweeting style: the account's activity

All 322 tweets registered during the campaign were published in a changing frequency, which we could define as irregular. The maximums coincided with the initial, half-way and last stages of the campaign: 31 tweets for the 9th, 26 for the
16th and again 31 for the 23rd. Before and after these peaks, ups and downs were registered in the number of tweets published, minima taking place on the 8th (12 tweets), the 18th (7 tweets) and the 24th (4 tweets).

However, not all messages were tweeted by @Pablo_Iglesias_. Leaving aside retweets, representing some 28 % of all published in his account, we counted that 77 % of tweets are written by the communication team, and only 23 % of them can be attributed to @Pablo_Iglesias_. Taking into account these data, we have plotted the following graph, showing the evolution of the account through the campaign, counting tweets published by the politician, tweets written by his team and retweets separately.

<figure><img src="image_64.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1 Amount and authorship of Tweets published by the account @Pablo_Iglesias_</figcaption></figure>

As seen in the table, maximums are powered by retweets on 9th and especially on 23rd, in the final drive of the campaign. The most significant differences between authorship are placed on these three peaks, as well as the 13th and 21st. In these five cases, politicians published less tweets than their teams. Indeed, if Pablo Iglesias personally posted as many tweets as his team on 15th, 22nd and 25th, he posted none on 8th and 9th, the two very first days of the campaign. On the whole, *Podemos*' communication team posted 179 tweets, three times more than the politician, who posted 32 tweets. The retweets totalled 91, doubling the politician's ones.

As previously mentioned, retweets registered their maximum on 23rd, having another outstanding rise at the beginning of the campaign, on 9th. The lowest
numbers were counted on the first and last day, and 10th and 13th. This last day Pablo Iglesias only retweeted once, while his publications were on the rise, above all those written by his team. Taking into account the information collected, it becomes clear that Pablo Iglesias' account gets its quantitative intensity thanks to his team's publications and not by his own tweets, which really appears to show that the importance the politician gave to Twitter, as a good monitoring tool for being in closer touch with the elector's worries, remained secondary. The same attitude seems to be shared by the politician's team, which at certain moments of the campaign left it to be filled by retweets, without maintaining about their own contributions to the account. The irregular rhythm of the account's publications could suggest the lack of a comprehensive plan or communication program specially designed for Twitter.

On the contrary, in relation to retweets, favourites and comments, as showed in the graphs placed below, the evolution is much more regular, as they follow a similar progression through the campaign:

<figure><img src="image_65.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2 Retweets, favourites and comments received by @Pablo_Iglesias_</figcaption></figure>

Numbers of retweets are always greater than favourites and comments, while the latter, by contrast, is placed everyday below retweets and favourites. Nevertheless, the maximum was registered for the three of them on 14th making a huge difference when compared to the days before and after. Other peaks were registered on 12th and 16th, and at the final stage of the campaign, on 21st and 23rd. On the whole, we could say these peaks coincide with the amount of publications made
each day: the more tweets are published, the more retweets, favourites and comments are gained by the politician. There is a noteworthy quantitative difference between these parameters on 14th, the day on which @Pablo_Iglesias_ received great attention when publishing a joke about the Popular Party: a witty comparison between the envelopes used by propaganda mailing and the ones used to bribe, which means the peak is not due to a participation with significant serious political content.

On the whole, this close and proportional relationship between the three variables mentioned could be a benchmark of the expectation created by @Pablo_Iglesias_' messages. The users are continuously waiting for his words in order to reply, to retweet or to give them a favourite, and the more tweets they read, the more they interact.

Considering all tweets published by @Pablo_Iglesias_, a total of 75 mentions have been counted, which means less than a quarter of all published: 23 % of tweets written included them. 29 turned out to be self-mentions, what means that @Pablo_Iglesias_ mentioned one of the accounts owned by his party or his party's leaders, 38,6 % of times he used the mention resource. Among the self-mentions, Podemos' account (@ahorapodemos) was the most significant consistently mentioned, followed by a varied range of mentions that included Podemos' local bases placed in different cities (@PodemosBerlin, @PodemosCordoba, @PodemosMalaga, @PodemosSa, @PODEMOS_LH) or Podemos' leaders such as Pablo Echenique (@pnique), Lola Sánchez Caldentey (@LolaPodemos), Tania González Peñas (@TaniaGonzalezPS) or Teresa Rodríguez (@TeresaRodr_). 46 tweets were mentioning accounts without any direct relation with the politician and his party, more than a half of times Pablo Iglesias' account used the mention resource. Among these, the accounts of the opposition candidates for the European Parliament were the most mentioned, Popular Party's Miguel Arias Cañete (@AriasCanete_, @Canete2014_) and Socialist Elena Valenciano (@ElenaValenciano). Mentions to both candidates always included a critical message and real debates with them or others and the ideological-political exchange that we would take as a given in a campaign are rarely achieved by the use of this resource.

However, there is an exception, which is not used too many times, but which we would like to highlight: @Pablo_Iglesias_ used a combination of the mentions @AriasCanete_ and @ElenaValenciano with #CaraACaraTVE, the hashtag used by Spanish national network RTVE for a debate between the candidates of the two Spanish majority parties. The appearance of the hashtag seemed aimed to criticise the absence of the rest of the parties and, in some way, @Pablo_Iglesias_
and Podemos used these Twitter resources to take part in the debate overcoming the setback.

These two recurring mentions are followed by the Spanish television morning magazine Mañanas Cuatro (@mananascuatro), where Pablo Iglesias eventually participated. This latter means a sort of self-mention, considering that the politician used it in order to inform people about his activity, his participation in the program, relaying some of his appearances. On the whole, mentions seem to be used to spread news of the politician's activity which, added to the extensive use of self-mentions, turns the use of Twitter mentions into trivial political participation.

<table><caption>Fig. 3 – The frequency of all mentions used (number of times each one appears during the campaign). The ones highlighted indicate self-mentions.</caption><tr><td>@ahorapodemos</td><td>11</td><td>@DcaValle</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@mananascuatro</td><td>6</td><td>@ensanro</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@ElenaValenciano</td><td>5</td><td>@espebuitrago</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@publico_es</td><td>5</td><td>@FacuDiazT</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@Canete2014_</td><td>4</td><td>@Grayfields</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@pnique</td><td>4</td><td>@IsabelDuran_</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@_Rubalcaba_</td><td>2</td><td>@juventudsin</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@AriasCanete_</td><td>2</td><td>@la_informacion</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@cuatro</td><td>2</td><td>@la_tuerka</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@eldiario</td><td>2</td><td>@LaManoPeli</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@Ierrejon</td><td>2</td><td>@LolaPodemos</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@TaniaGonzalezPs</td><td>2</td><td>@marienkadner</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@TeresaRodr_</td><td>2</td><td>@MonederoJC</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@Ainhat</td><td>1</td><td>@PODEMOS_LH</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@Armeteo</td><td>1</td><td>@PodemosBerlin</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@berlunes</td><td>1</td><td>@PodemosCordoba</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@Caminator</td><td>1</td><td>@PodemosMalaga</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@CasaReal</td><td>1</td><td>@PodemosSa</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>@CSOALaMadrenha</td><td>1</td><td>@podemosuvieu</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>@Zamora24horas</td><td>1</td></tr></table>
Pablo Iglesias used hashtags in four out of ten tweets, and all of the most significant ones present a clear attempt to spread and promote Podemos, with claims such as #DifundePodemos, #Podemos1000razones, #YoVotoPodemos and #Podemos25M. Only two of the hashtags registered covered public concerns, such as unemployment (#ParadosM4) and retirement (#Jubilados). #SinBancosPodemos was used to highlight Podemos' independence from banks financing and show its crowdfunding efforts. Nevertheless, the three hashtags mentioned were used only on one occasion. One more time, as said above about mentions, Pablo Iglesias is using Twitter hashtags for two main purposes: contributing to his party propaganda and criticising the opposition and the political establishment, which avoids political exchanges and closer dialogue with citizens.

<table><caption>Fig. 4 – The frequency of all hashtags used (number of times each one appears during the campaign).</caption><tr><td>#YoVotoPodemos</td><td>19</td><td>#Sevilla</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>#DifundePodemos</td><td>13</td><td>#Gracias</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#SinBancosPodemos</td><td>11</td><td>#democracia</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#VotandoPodemos</td><td>11</td><td>#España</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#ClaroQuePodemos</td><td>10</td><td>#Europa</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Podemos1000Razones</td><td>10</td><td>#Jubíalos</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Podemos25M</td><td>9</td><td>#LaMadenaNunPieslla</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#CartaPodemos</td><td>7</td><td>#LosSimpson</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#QueTeneisQueEsconder</td><td>7</td><td>#Madrid</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Podemos</td><td>6</td><td>#Mafalda</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#CaraACaraTVE</td><td>5</td><td>#Málaga</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#25M</td><td>3</td><td>#Málaga</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Alicante</td><td>2</td><td>#NadaQueEsconder</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Almería</td><td>2</td><td>#ParadosM4</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Berlin</td><td>2</td><td>#Quino</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#Cultura</td><td>2</td><td>#TomamosLesPlaces</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#JuegoDeTronos</td><td>2</td><td>#VotandoPodemos</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>#literatura</td><td>2</td><td>#Zaragoza</td><td>1</td></tr></table>
Links counted present similar numbers: about half of the tweets (45 %) incor-
porated a link. Most of them (28 %) are photographs, which are employed to
publicize political acts and show *Podemos'* propaganda. We have also found an
extensive use of journalistic pieces linked (25 %), above all to the interviews made
with @Pablo_Iglesias_ during the campaign, and a huge variety of videos (16 %),
though the vast majority of them spread the official video made by *Podemos* for
the campaign. Moreover, the large number of times *Podemos'* official video was
repeatedly announced showed a lack of creativity and digital resources, and high-
lighted again that @Pablo_Iglesias_' main goal, in terms of hypertextuality, is to
achieve the highest efficiency in promoting his party, even when political public
concerns are left aside.

As noted in the methodological introduction, the appearance of hashtags as
well as links has a significant meaning that goes beyond the interest of measur-
ing: they show the politician's willingness to introduce into his account a new
debate based on the concerns of the Spanish public or to participate in a pre-
existing discussion. However, as predicted above, the cases observed during the
European campaign do not support the idea that @Pablo_Iglesias_' uses these
tools to introduce qualitatively relevant political debates. Hashtags and links were
published in about half of the messages, but their intention is invariably related to
either the candidate himself or the party, rather than towards significant political,
ideological or public issues.

Moreover, @Pablo_Iglesias_' trend to include references to his own party is
confirmed by the source of his retweets. As showed in the graph placed below, the
60,44 % of the publications retweeted came from *Podemos*, which added to the
5,48 % from Podemos politicians and the 2,20 % of *Podemos* base politics, means
that the 68,12 % of all retweets are based on *Podemos* proposals and propaganda,
leaving only a much lower 12,09 % to citizens. @Pablo_Iglesias_ did not make
electors the main characters of his campaign. The account seemed to be setting
them aside.
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5 – Sources of retweets</figcaption></figure>

## 11.3 Account content: themes and intentions

As noted in the methodological introduction, the 20 categories used to classify tweets' and retweets' theme were divided into two different macro-types based on political participation. Two of the categories that belong to the group linked to political theatricals are placed in the top three. The topic *Electoral Campaign* represents 28.9 % of all published by @Pablo_Iglesias_, while *Political Activity* takes a 17.7 %, the first and the third positions in the ranking of themes considered, respectively.

<figure><img src="image_67.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6 – Number of tweets published by themes</figcaption></figure>
Indeed, if we put together by groups the numbers placed in the graph seen above, the one that represents political theatricals obtained a total of 48 %, while political engagement covered 48.4 % of tweets published. The remaining 3.4 % is referred to the category *Other*, where a huge and varied range of issues related to very specific conflicts were covered. Almost half of the total publications of the @Pablo_Iglesias_ account are thus likely to represent trivial political participation (political theatricals), while the other half may represent valuable political interaction (political engagement).

Furthermore, when talking about *Electoral Campaign*, Pablo Iglesias referred directly to elections, urging people to vote for *Podemos* and using some of the hashtags already mentioned, which were created explicitly for that goal, mainly #YoVotoPodemos, #VotandoPodemos, #Podemos25M and #Podemos1000Razones. Moreover, he used Twitter to promote campaign tactics and methods, such as encouraging Podemos' supporters to mailshot the party's propaganda (strengthening the traditional campaign), as well as calling on them to adopt the graphic avatar of the party as their profile photo to show their preference for *Podemos* (taking advantage of digital native resources). In both cases, the hashtag normally attached was #DifundePodemos, though in the ones specifically referring to mailshots, #CartaPodemos appeared occasionally. This last hashtag implies an interesting action, as it is the use of Twitter to create a closer and stronger relationship between the political campaign and *Podemos'* supporters. Though the hashtag was used by the politician on very few occasions, its appearance is important in order to highlight an original and unique use of Twitter: #CartaPodemos underscores Twitter's characteristic interaction and participation features, letting citizens become a part of the campaign and responsible for *Podemos'* triumph. It is a resource Jungherr (2010) proved to be a successful tool in creating strong communities during the German elections on 2009 and a strategy the two main Spanish political leaders did not use on Twitter during the 2011 legislative campaign (Cebrián and Vázquez, 2013).

*Political Activity* referred the vast majority of times to announcements or dissemination of news about political rallies and @Pablo_Iglesias_' appearances in the media. These tweets were often published linked to a photo, showing the rally poster or the politician surrounded by his supporters where the rally took place, or a streaming video link, where users could find the live program.

As opposed to this, the top two themes raised from the group related to political engagement are *Politics* (27,6 %) and *Social Problems* (7,1 %), which ranked, respectively, second and fourth in the general ranking. Among the specific issues covered by both themes, we concluded after the content evaluation that @Pablo_Iglesias_ focused his messages mainly on political parties and political lead-
ers, followed by the ones about political institutions, demonstrations and social movements, this latter because 15th May was the anniversary of the protests that took place on 2011, and which gave their name to the 15-M Movement.

Following the Spanish research institute Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, we adopted the ranking of public political concerns which featured in the barometer that this institution produced for May 2014. The aim of this is to compare the ten national issues that Spaniards were most concerned about with the ones with national importance covered by Pablo Iglesias' tweets, in order to establish whether *Podemos' leader* was tweeting about the electors' worries or not during the campaign.

Among the top ten worries collected by the CIS, half of them were covered by Pablo Iglesias' publications: *Unemployment, Corruption and Fraud, Economic Problems, Political Parties and Leaders and Treasury and Fiscal Policies*, which summed up a total of 99 tweets. The rest of them, excluding the undefined *Other*, were not covered at all by *Podemos'* leader: Health, *Education, Social Conflicts and Immigration*. Indeed, 1 out of 3 tweets published by the politician's account dealt with any one of the CIS' issues, though, as can be seen in the table below, the level of importance changes when comparing one to another. Thus, *Unemployment*, the topic that concerns most Spanish citizens, occupies the third position on @Pablo_Iglesias_' priorities. On the contrary, the politician dedicates most of his messages to talk about *Political parties and leaders*, a theme that only worries electors in fourth place.

<table><caption>Fig. 7 – Top 10 ranking of Spanish public concerns covered by the CIS' barometer and Pablo Iglesias' account</caption><thead><tr><td></td><td>CIS' barometer</td><td>Pablo Iglesias</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>Unemployment (80,80 %)</td><td>Political parties and leaders (12,42 % / 40 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>Corruption and Fraud (35,70 %)</td><td>Corruption and Fraud (7,14 % / 23 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>Economic Problems (28,60 %)</td><td>Unemployment (3,11 % / 10 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Political parties and leaders (25,60 %)</td><td>Economic Problems (2,80 %, 9 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>Health (10,40 %)</td><td>Social Movements (1,86 % / 6 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>Education (8,7 %)</td><td>National Establishment (1,24 % / 4 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>Social Conflicts (7,9 %)</td><td>International Affairs (0, 93 % / 3 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>Other (5,3 %)</td><td>Other (0,93 % / 3 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>Treasury and fiscal policies (4,8 %)</td><td>Treasury and fiscal policies (0,62 % / 2 tweets)</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>Immigration (4,3 %)</td><td>International Institutions (0,62 % / 2 tweets)</td></tr></tbody></table>
A quick glimpse of the percentages of *Intentions* achieved by @Pablo_Iglesias_ gives us the key to complete and to understand data provided by *Themes* covered: self-promotion and the spread of Podemos rallies was the most significant intention of @Pablo_Iglesias_' campaign, thus "Visibility of the Politician" and "Achievements Advertising" (33.2 %), followed by his critical messages (26.7 %) and calls for action (13.4 %). Thus, the intentions registered totally suit the top themes covered.

When talking about “Electoral Campaign” and “Political Activity” the intentions falls on urging his supporters to help and to vote *Podemos* and the announcements of his presence in political rallies and the media. This preference for self-promotion, propaganda and continuous and repetitive requests for assistance to supporters sidestep the political arena, making half of the campaign a showcase where the electors could find accurate personal information about Pablo Iglesias, but not necessarily as much information corresponding to dominant subjects of public interest.

Furthermore, the tweets focused on “Politics” and “Social Problems” generally criticize the opposition parties and leaders as well as the actions taken by them to solve the problems that concern Spaniards. The intention “Critical Message” was at the methodological introduction considered to be promising as far as it could set up an ideological bulwark that might propitiate political debates. However, that relationship with critics led Pablo Iglesias to avoid *Unemployment* as the first and most significant topic. During the second quarter of 2014, considering data provided by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE, 2014), unemployment was recovering, showing for the first time in the last six years positive figures. That recovery prevented @Pablo_Iglesias_ from focussing his critics on unemployment. On the whole, because of @Pablo_Iglesias_' determination to focus his discourse on a critical view, he even obviates the opportunity to build constructive dialogue and engagement, wasting again the chance to propose new solutions to issues which were causing considerable concern to the electors.

## 11.4 Interaction: from citizens to Pablo Iglesias

As anticipated in the introduction, we learn more about @Pablo_Iglesias_' interaction through the comments he received and the conversations he established with electors. As set out in the methodology, we have chosen three significant dates running through the campaign that represent three different stages of it (supra).

First of all, interaction around the account @Pablo_Iglesias_' is primarily due to the 527 comments/answers received by users. Thus, the research about inter-
action had to be influenced and framed since the very beginning by the claim that @Pablo_Iglesias_ did not really interact with the users, because he did not establish a conversation with the voters, missing out opportunities to set up a dialogue that could either answer people's concerns or criticism. Noteworthy is this absence of any kind of real interaction, if we keep in mind that Podemos claims have been focused on the effort to increase civic participation, and indeed Pablo Iglesias himself tended to put this forward when participating on media shows and newspaper interviews, presenting himself as a leader sensitive to citizens' concerns. The reality of his usage seems to be in stark contrast to this: @Pablo_Iglesias_ only used the “reply” option once.

Therefore, it is not @Pablo_Iglesias_ but the electors' attempts at interaction that were measured. Because the candidate is not carrying out the effort to be linked with citizen's concerns, the voters were the only ones attempting to establish a dialogue with the candidate and be closer to him, and hence the only source of data to analyze.

If we have talked so far about “citizens” and “electors”, it is because percentages are very clear when showing the source of comments: 92 % of the total comes from citizens with no direct political affiliations indicated on their Twitter profiles. From the political scene, 6 % correspond to Podemos' own politicians, while 1 % is related to a range of Podemos' local political bases from different Spanish cities. These two groups involved themselves in dialogue to interact with citizens, answering the requests made, resolving some concerns already posed and, in conclusion, trying to accomplish some of the interaction eluded by @Pablo_Iglesias_. The remaining 1 % corresponds to journalists. This last 1 % rate may highlight the low interest showed by journalists to ask the candidate questions via Twitter, and the inconsistent media hype generated around Podemos and his leader.

Turning now to Themes evoked by citizens those three days, *Politics* is the most significant one, 40 % of the total, with concerns ranging from political parties and leaders to social movements. *Social Problems* such as fraud and corruption registered 14 %, occupying the third place right after *Other* (19 %), a huge range of topics whose variety made a specific analysis impossible, though many of them could be explained when getting a glimpse to the quality of the comments: 29 % of the total are irrelevant and incoherent, which means that 153 comments do not have any consistency with the theme of the original tweet posted by the politician and do not raise or address a political main issue. 68 % of comments are relevant and coherent, while the remaining 3 % is incoherent, not related to the topic posted by @Pablo_Iglesias_, but relevant in terms of politics.
<figure><img src="image_68.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 8 – Percentages of the themes covered by the user's comments, and compared to the ones post by @Pablo_Iglesias_</figcaption></figure>

When talking about the citizens' *Intention*, the graph placed below shows us that half of them are *Favourable* to @Pablo_Iglesias_:

<figure><img src="image_69.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 9 – Comments' intention</figcaption></figure>

The high numbers presented by *Unclassifiable* comments can be explained, again, through the large portion of incoherent and irrelevant ones. The data collected by *Question*, combined by the total absence of @Pablo_Iglesias_dialogue, shows that at least 37 citizens' requests have not been directly replied to / dealt with.

## 11.5 Conclusions

The analysis developed throughout this chapter confirms a significant difference between the “new politics style” attributed to *Podemos* by the media, and the
political communication strategy materialized in the Twitter account @Pablo_Iglesias_ during the European Election campaign.

First, the emphasis placed by the media on Pablo Iglesias as representing a renewed style of leadership was not materialized in the account's contents during the campaign:

1. Most of the tweets posted in @Pablo_Iglesias_ were written by his team (77 %), which reflects that the politician's attention was not focused on tweeting, throwing away the opportunity to address directly the citizens, without the mediatisation of other conventional channels.

2. The Twitter account even seems to have been considered as a minor channel during the European campaign: the intensity achieved by @Pablo_Iglesias_ at certain significant moments of the campaign, such as the final stage, is due to retweets, which means these moments are not followed by an extra effort by the team to manage Twitter and post its own original material on it.

3. @Pablo_Iglesias_ used Twitter operators and functions such as mentions, hashtags, links and retweets in order to promote Podemos' political acts and to inform people about his own participation in them as well as criticizing the opposition's procedures. As a general rule, very few attempts were made during the campaign to use these tools as a means to encourage political exchange between candidates, to discuss Spanish public concerns or to establish a real dialogue in order to be aware of citizens' opinions.

4. Self-promotion and propaganda for Podemos were the main goals achieved by Pablo Iglesias' account. The continuous and repetitive requests for assistance and support brought the absence of a real and interesting campaign based on the main goal of establishing a dialogue founded on citizens' concerns.

5. The themes covered by Pablo Iglesias' account highlight once more the importance the politician gave to self-promotion and propaganda, above all when considering that political engagement's top theme (*Politics*) was destined to criticize the opposition, avoiding the opportunity to achieve a political exchange between candidates and enrich the Spanish political scene by covering citizens' concerns with it. Moreover, differences between the CIS barometer and @Pablo_Iglesias_ thematic showed again the lack of attention when evaluating Spaniards' real worries and interests.

Second, the dialogical style proposed by Podemos as a sign of his renewed politics is not materialized in the @Pablo_Iglesias_ account during the European campaign.
6. Although the bidirectional expectations are confirmed by the figures of retweets, favourites and comments obtained, Pablo Iglesias' profile answers just once during all the campaign misusing the opportunity for personalized contact and dialogue with voters.

7. Contact and dialogue were presumably comfortable considering that most of the comments were favourable. The close and proportional relation between the retweets, favourites and comments obtained by Pablo Iglesias' tweets confirms the users' interest in Pablo Iglesias' publications: the more the politician tweets, the more his supporters interact.

8. On comparing the themes achieved by Pablo Iglesias and those posted by the citizens through their comments, significant differences were found: while citizens' concerns appear to be *Social Problems* and *Ideology*, Pablo Iglesias chose to engage in political theatricals and political parties and leaders.

Globally considered, the exposed results clearly suggest that Podemos' aspiration to renew Spanish political discourse on Twitter has not been achieved, on the whole, by its leader's account. The actions performed are not understood as opportunities to foster political dialogue with the public or as a chance to allow citizens to employ their Twitter accounts as a means to invigorate political interaction.

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List of Contributors

**Dr Elena Albu** is a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship holder at the University of Geneva. She completed her PhD dissertation “The Pragmatics of Negative Structures in Political Discourse: A Relevance Theoretic Approach” in September 2012. She conducts empirical research into various aspects of language structure and her research interests are found at the interface between pragmatics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and computer-mediated communication.

**Mario Anastasiadis**, M.A. is research assistant at the University of Bonn/Germany, Department for Media Studies. His research interests are social media and political communication, media and popular culture, popular music in the media, extremism on the internet and qualitative methods (online and offline). In the research project *Deliberation on the Net*, which is part of the DFG priority programme *Mediatized Worlds* (funded by the German Science Foundation) he is dealing with questions of online media logics and media change within the framework of political discourses on Twitter. E-mail: anastasiadis@medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de, Twitter: @M_Anastasiadis

**Ian Basaille-Gahitte** is a PhD student in Computer Science at the the Electronics, Informatics and Image Laboratory (LE2I) UMR CNRS 6306, at the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France). He is also a research engineer at a French company, where he works on client relationship management and social media.

**Fernando Bonete Vizcaino** is PhD student and assistant professor at CEU San Pablo University (Madrid, Spain), where he graduated in Humanities and Journalism in 2013. He is also running his professional career as internal communication manager at CEU Educational Group, Spain's main university corporation. He is a member of the INCIR TV ("Internet, Radio and Television Convergence") research group, where he specialises in information and communications technology and media convergence. E-mail: fernando.bonetevizcaino@ceu.es

**Dr Gilles Brachotte** is associate professor in Communication Science at the University of Burgundy, member of the CIMEOS/3S research team (EA 4177) and teaches at the web design department of Dijon-Auxerre Technological Institute (IUT Dijon-Auxerre). After started his career as an IT / networks teacher, his research has taken him into the field of communication science and more specifically ICT usage. He focuses on the way ICT is used in practice and more generally on social change resulting from adoption and integration of ICT in society,
notably among young people and in the political sphere. His research focuses on the discursive, social, ergonomic and technical dimensions which are sources of meaning and contribute to complexify the communication processes involved.
E-mail: Gilles.brachotte@u-bourgogne.fr.

**Dr Elena Cebrián Guinovart** is a lecturer at CEU San Pablo University, in Madrid (Spain), where she teaches Communication and Information Theory. Her research interests include Political Infotainment, Political Communication in Social Media and Religion in the Media. Current research focuses on the implications of social media on political participation. She was a visiting researcher at Pontificia Università della Santa Croche (Rome, Italy) in 2007 and 2009. E-mail: ecebrian@ceu.es

**Vittorio Cobianchi** is researcher for Cares-Osservatorio di Pavia; his main areas of research interest are textual analysis and textual data mining, and social network data mining. He is adjunct professor at Università di Milano-Bicocca. Among other publications, he contributed to the writing of the books *Lo spettacolo della politica. Protagonismo e servizio nel talk-show* (The Show of Politics), Rai-Eri, Roma 1998, and *Il caso Di Bella nella televisione e nella stampa italiana* (The Di Bella affaire as portrayed by Italian media), Rai-Eri, Roma 1999. E-mail: vcobianchisservatorio.it.

**Dr Dario Compagno** is Assistant Professor at the New Sorbonne University in Paris, where he teaches Semiotics and Social Network Analysis to undergraduate Communication students. Graduated in Italy from the University of Bologna and the University of Siena, his research focuses on digital objects (websites, social media, computer games) and their meaning, from a semiotic perspective. He is a member of the MCPN (EA 1484 – CIM) and the CREM (EA 3476) research groups.

**Dr. Jessica Einspänner-Pflock** is research assistant at the University of Bonn/ Germany, Department for Media Studies. She studied new media and communications in Bonn and Singapore, finishing her PhD in Bonn in 2015. Her research interests are social media and political communication, social interaction online, online privacy, public relations, digital methods. She is a member of the DFG priority programme *Mediatized* Worlds, where she deals with questions of online media logics and media change within the framework of political discourses on Twitter. E-mail: jep@uni-bonn.de, Twitter: @einpflock

**Dr Alex Frame** is associate professor in Communication Science at the Languag-es and Communication Faculty of the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France), where he runs the MA course in Intercultural Management. Born in Britain, he