Spanish general elections, microdiscourses around #20D and social mobilisation on twitter: Reality or appearance?

Abstract

The nature of collective mobilisation has profoundly changed with the rise of Web 2.0 and collaborative platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Specifically, Twitter-a public microblogging service-is clearly helping to inform, discuss, announce, and disseminate many types of political, social, or cultural protest or collective mobilisation. The recent decline of bipartisanship in Spain has captured significant attention through the recent sociopolitical debates and messages circulating on Twitter. This chapter is based on an extraction of tweets before, during and after the recent electoral process in Spain. We mined tweets published from 23 November 2015 to 8 February 2016 (the elections took place on 20 December 2015). For the mining process, we used the string '20D’ as a search criterion through which tweets about the electoral process in Spain were identified. The dataset for this chapter consists of a sample of 28,261 tweets containing ‘20D’. They were extracted with the help of NodeXL. Our objective through this work is to identify the microdiscourses that appear with ‘20D’, analyse the co-hashtags relationships, and attempt to identify patterns about the types of messages that are mainly disseminated through Twitter. We also detected different communities of hashtags and visualised them through Gephi, which helps us understand how political and social discourses are articulated through visual and textual narratives.