When Politicians Talk About Politics: Identifying Political Tweets of Brazilian Congressmen
This work addresses the challenge of characterizing political communication on social media for researchers and policymakers, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific dataset.
The authors tackled the problem of distinguishing political from non-political tweets by Brazilian congressmen during a political crisis, proposing a method that accurately identifies such tweets using word clouds and topic modeling, and found that over half of the messages were non-political.
Since June 2013, when Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation, a political crisis is in course. In midst of this crisis, Brazilian politicians use social media to communicate with the electorate in order to retain or to grow their political capital. The problem is that many controversial topics are in course and deputies may prefer to avoid such themes in their messages. To characterize this behavior, we propose a method to accurately identify political and non-political tweets independently of the deputy who posted it and of the time it was posted. Moreover, we collected tweets of all congressmen who were active on Twitter and worked in the Brazilian parliament from October 2013 to October 2017. To evaluate our method, we used word clouds and a topic model to identify the main political and non-political latent topics in parliamentarian tweets. Both results indicate that our proposal is able to accurately distinguish political from non-political tweets. Moreover, our analyses revealed a striking fact: more than half of the messages posted by Brazilian deputies are non-political.