Eleccionesméxico2018: Post election analysis of news media’s tweets and citizens’ feedback

Abstract

Political parties and their candidates use social networks as a new tool for political communication and so the media have also begun to use them in the same context. This article focuses on the analysis of the posts made by the news media on Twitter (tweets) during the week following Mexico’s 2018 elections, based on the informative, secondary and protagonist roles proposed by Vallés (2007), and on the reactions these posts generated on citizens. Content analysis has been performed on a sample of 525 tweets posted by 18 Mexican and international news media organizations. The results show that the three roles that traditional media publications play, according to Vallés (2007), can be extrapolated to the posts they make on Twitter, and that there are differences in the performance of these functions across news media outlets. The main innovation in the use of Twitter by news media is associated to citizens’ feedback (retweets and mentions), which has allowed us to determine that the “protagonist” role is the most commonly played within the political context under study.