Hacia una campaña computacional: herramientas y estrategias online en las elecciones españolas

Abstract

The computational campaign suggests the exploitation and sophistication of the discourse by extracting and analyzing the electorate's personal data, as well as the automation of diffusion tasks through techniques such as bots. This new stage in political communication has also been approached from a critical perspective, that questions the change of public opinion in the network and the adaptation of political discourse depending on the audience. This article aims to approach the techniques of computational analysis deployed during the last general and regional elections in Spain. And to do so, it uses the qualitative methodology based, on the one hand, on sixteen in-depth interviews with political parties with representation in the Congress of Deputies and Castile and Leon regional Parliament (Popular Party, Socialist Party, Podemos, Citizens and United Left); and on the other hand, on non-participant observation by means of an ethnographic content analysis for the specific internal monitoring of the resources and proposals for information, interaction, cooperation and mobilization facilitated in different online resources generated by the examined parties. Even if far from the US context, campaign teams confirm the use of new tools for mobilization such as WhatsApp, and the development of strategies based on data extraction and automated messages, like bots. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]