# Election campaigning on social media: Politicians, audiences and the mediation of political communication on Facebook and Twitter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08825/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Twitter Topic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09824/) (2022)
- [Negativity Spreads Faster: A Large-Scale Multilingual Twitter Analysis on the Role of Sentiment in Political Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00396/) (2022)
- [Upvotes? Downvotes? No Votes? Understanding the relationship between reaction mechanisms and political discourse on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09540/) (2023)
- [The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of Abe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18004/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although considerable research has concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how politicians use different social media platforms in political communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign 2013, this article investigates whether election candidates address the topics most important to the mass audience and to which extent their communication is shaped by the characteristics of Facebook and Twitter. Based on open-ended responses from a representative survey conducted during the election campaign, we train a human-interpretable Bayesian language model to identify political topics. Applying the model to social media messages of candidates and their direct audiences, we find that both prioritize different topics than the mass audience. The analysis also shows that politicians use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. We relate the various findings to the mediation of political communication on social media induced by the particular characteristics of audiences and sociotechnical environments.