Astroturfing and Spanish political debate from social networks: a case study

Abstract

The objective of the work is to estimate the use of astroturfing as a strategy to promote political debates in Spain through Twitter. A total of 89,528 twits associated with the discussion generated around the holidays of the First Vice President and the Minister of Equality of the Government of Spain, Pablo Iglesias, and Irene Montero, are collected and analyzed between August 14 and 20, 2020. The case studied allows seeing a non-electoral political scenario based on astroturfing and nano-influencers capable of distributing, amplifying, and flooding social networks such as Twitter, disinformative and confrontational content.