One-Sided Conversations: The 2012 Presidential Election on Twitter

Abstract

Technology has been promoted as a way to facilitate interactions across disparate groups of people. Political discourse has been historically constrained by geographic proximity of participants. The introduction of the Internet and specifically social media has altered these geographic constraints and political discourse is now one of the most prevalent activities in social media. As more individuals begin to use technology for political activity, understanding how the technology is used becomes increasingly important. Previous research exploring political discourse on social media has focused on one discrete event or a narrow time period. This narrow focus limits the understanding of the complex election environment. This study takes a longitudinal approach to examine the use of conversational syntactical features in Twitter derived from a 53 million Twitter message corpus collected during the 2012 Presidential Election (August 20, 2012 -- November 13, 2012). This study identifies that, although candidates and media are the most talked about and talked to, these interactions elicit no response. The lack of response is counter to many of the perceived benefits of social media. These findings have implications for understanding how the public uses social media to engage with political candidates and the possibilities for how technology could be altered to better facilitate these interactions.