Article: Twitter and Politics
Title: Identification and analysis of the opinion leaders around the figure of Hugo Chávez on Twitter
Revista Latina de Comunicación Social.68, pp. 696 a 718,
DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2013-997en
Autores: Luis Deltell, Mari Luz Congosto, Florencia Claes y J.M. Osteso.
Abstract: The aims are to identify the opinion leaders around the figure of Hugo Chávez on Twitter during the time of the sample, analyze user behavior in the microblogging space, and demonstrate whether full cyberdemocracy or mass self-communication are currently taking place. Results. The research has monitored all tweets which included the identifiers Chávez, Chavez, @chávez, @chavez on Twitter and has analyzed the daily flow of tweets from January 5 to April 13 2013 (UTC/ GMT – 4). Thus, with 19,943,709 tweets and 8,450,049 users, we have created the largest corpus of messages about a Latin-American political issue in Spanish ever presented by scientific research. Conclusions. This article demonstrates now full cyberdemocracy or mass self-communication are not currently taking place.
Keywords: Twitter; Opinion Leader; Venezuela; Hugo Chávez; Social Network.
