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    Agenda formation and prediction of voting tendencies for European parliament election using textual, social and network features
    (Springer, 2024) Shahi, Gautam Kishore; Basyurt, Ali Sercan; Stieglitz, Stefan; Neuberger, Christoph
    As per agenda-setting theory, political agenda is concerned with the government’s agenda, including politicians and political parties. Political actors utilize various channels to set their political agenda, including social media platforms such as Twitter (now X). Political agenda-setting can be influenced by anonymous user-generated content following the Bright Internet. This is why speech acts, experts, users with affiliations and parties through annotated Tweets were analyzed in this study. In doing so, the agenda formation during the 2019 European Parliament Election in Germany based on the agenda-setting theory as our theoretical framework, was analyzed. A prediction model was trained to predict users’ voting tendencies based on three feature categories: social, network, and text. By combining features from all categories logistical regression leads to the best predictions matching the election results. The contribution to theory is an approach to identify agenda formation based on our novel variables. For practice, a novel approach is presented to forecast the winner of events.
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    Crisis Communication on Twitter: Differences Between User Types in Top Tweets About the 2015 “Refugee Crisis” in Germany
    (2023) Kapidzic, Sanja; Frey, Felix; Neuberger, Christoph; Stieglitz, Stefan; Mirbabaie, Milad
    The study explores differences between three user types in the top tweets about the 2015 “refugee crisis” in Germany and presents the results of a quantitative content analysis. All tweets with the keyword “Flüchtlinge” posted for a monthlong period following September 13, 2015, the day Germany decided to implement border controls, were collected (N = 763,752). The top 2,495 tweets according to number of retweets were selected for analysis. Differences between news media, public and private actor tweets in topics, tweet characteristics such as tone and opinion expression, links, and specific sentiments toward refugees were analyzed. We found strong differences between the tweets. Public actor tweets were the main source of positive sentiment toward refugees and the main information source on refugee support. News media tweets mostly reflected traditional journalistic norms of impartiality and objectivity, whereas private actor tweets were more diverse in sentiments toward refugees.
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    How News Websites Refer to Twitter. A Content Analysis of Twitter Sources in Journalism
    (2022) Kapidzic, Sanja; Neuberger, Christoph; Frey, Felix; Stieglitz, Stefan; Mirbabaie, Milad
    The study presents the results of a standardized content analysis comparing the use of Twitter as an information source on the websites of five news media types (quality newspapers, a tabloid newspaper, weekly magazines, broadcasters, and internet only). The theoretical assumption behind the study is that the adoption of Twitter as a source follows the established practices of a particular media type. All articles published online by ten German news media in a period of one month were collected (n = 21,823). A subset of articles containing Twitter-related keywords (n = 496) and 375 tweets cited in these articles was explored in detail. Our focal analysis of n = 287 articles using Twitter as an information source revealed systematic differences between both media types and article topics regarding the number and style of Twitter references as well as the types of accounts cited. We found that the tabloid paper incorporated the highest number of tweets per article, incorporated tweets primarily in articles on human interest and gossip and cited non-elite sources more often than other media types. Quality papers, weekly magazines, and broadcasters used tweets as sources primarily in articles on politics and economy and cited public actors, such as politicians or officials, more frequently.