The use of twitter during the 2009 German national election

German Politics

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2015, Pages 469-490

  Jürgens, Pascal ^a   Jungherr, Andreas ^b  

^a JOHANNES GUTENBERG UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MANNHEIM   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84951137247     PISSN: 09644008     EISSN: 17438993     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09644008.2015.1116522     Document Type: Article

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61. The many conventions used to mark copies and refer to other users make it hard to capture all possible uses automatically. We chose to follow Twitter’s technological imperatives as closely as possible, counting only messages that started with ‘@user’ as directed messages. Retweets were captured by Twitter’s ‘in_reply_to_user_id’ field as well as the conventions ‘RT’, ‘retweet’, ‘from’ and ‘via’ followed by a username.
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64. This figure does not include users talking about political issues without using one of our selected political hashtags, so it certainly is a lower bound estimate. The number could be made more precise by including all hashtags that begin with one of our list – for example, allowing ‘#piratenberlin’ as an extension of ‘#piraten’. However, these longer tags are only employed by a small number of users, limiting their visibility. By limiting our attention on the popular topics we ensure that their degree of ‘publicness’ is at least roughly equal.
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66. It also reflects visibility but does not increase it, since directed messages are only normally seen by their author and addressee.
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68. Neuberger et al., Twitter und Journalismus for a network analysis of websites.