The political tweets of #elxn43
Postmedia analyzed more 5,500 tweets from the official Twitter accounts of party leaders since the start of the election campaign, scoring each tweet as positive or negative based on word choice. Two periods stood out as the most negative for all candidates: the period following the discovery of Trudeau’s brown face photos, and the days leading up to debates, when the accounts were used to attack other party leaders and their polices.
Overall, though, most tweets were classified as slightly positive or neutral — likely because the focus of the leader’s accounts was often on promoting campaign events or policy announcements rather than engaging with the public.
“It’s rare that we see party leaders authentically engage with voters,” said Anatoliy Gruzd, director of Ryerson University’s Social Media Lab. “They’re busy on the campaign trail and they have a whole social media team managing the account so sometimes its hard to come off as authentic.”
But using Twitter to broadcast policy announcement and campaign updates in real time makes Twitter particularly appealing to politicians, he said.
“Now they don’t need to wait until the next morning to set up a press conference.”
Methodology
Tweets from the official accounts of party leaders were analyzed using an Afinn model for sentiment analysis, which calculates a positive or negative value for each word in the tweet. Daily scores were calculated by taking the average from each days tweets, excluding retweets and French language tweets. Yves-Francois Blanchet published very few tweets in English and was dropped from the analysis.