The End of News? Twitter and Local

Election Information in a Canadian Context

Jaigris Hodson, Ph.D, Royal Roads University

Outline

Social Media and News

The Canadian Election #ELXN 42

Methods

Trending Topics

Local vs. National Discourse

Conclusions/Questions

Twitter’s Promise

Social Media:

An

Increasingly

Popular

Source of

News...

...But What Kind of News?

The Canadian Election: #Elxn42

Methods

Scrape all tweets with the hashtag #ELXN42 one month prior to the 2015 Federal

Election

Examine key words, influencers, and other trends in the large data set

Look at smaller local communities (8); examining key words, influencers and other

trends

Compare

Trends: Key Topics

Trends: Key Influencers

Trends: Smaller Communities

Prolific Tweeters

By CommunityPERSON NUMBER OF TWEETS

K Fox 769

Lesley Sprague 528

Doug 520

Tynan Phillips 314

Ontarible 291

Dan 211

Cheryl Howes 190

ausername 176

If not us? Who? 171

Karen 160

Jess Childs 87

Top @-Mentions

@pmharper, @ElizabethMay and

@ThomasMulcair in top 20

Most are well known - journalists,

media, or politicos

Not seeing local candidates

Left vs. Right on Twitter?

National news RT’d more than local

news

NO. OF RTS NAME

116 @Raffi_RC

115 @PatOndabak

104 @Chevymo

104 @JustinTrudeau

104 @stephenlautens

79 @rabble.ca

74 @CTVNews

60 @MuskokaMoneybag

58 @gmbutts

57 @ABCVeterans2015

Preliminary Conclusions

Twitter in practice - not multi point to multi point

Role of news media, and particularly local news

media

New influencers and gatekeepers

Algorithmic filtering

Content curation and quality control

Twitter as a leading indicator of public opinion?

Thank you!Jaigris Hodson

jaigris.hodson@RoyalRoads.ca

@SocMedDr

Research Sponsored by SSHRC, Royal Roads University and Ryerson University