Elections and the Twitter Community: The Case of Right-Wing and Left-Wing Primaries for the 2017 French Presidential Election

Abstract

Digital social networks and social media have created increased attention and have become important in the political life of a country. Politicians, media and citizens are visible online and share their opinions immediately on these platforms. During the last days before an election a lot of activity is observed on these media, giving a picture of the issues and key people. In this paper, we study the case of the French primaries election through the Twitter microscope over a period of 10 days preceding the election. We apply social network analysis to uncover the key topics and influencers for the left and right-wings. A set of 6 graphs are constructed to analyze, separately and conjointly, the opposing factions by means of mentions and hashtag graphs.