Tweets and retweets from the main political parties leading up to the 2019 General Election -
An extended abstract

Martyn Harris and Mark Levene

Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
Birkbeck University of London

Social media platforms generate a vast amount of data on a daily basis, on a variety of topics and consequently represent a key source of information for anyone interested in a current snapshot of online presence in society. In recent years, there has been an increased amount of research into social media data across a wide variety of disciplines, including sociology, computer science, marketing, and political science.

Twitter is the most popular platform for academic research, as it provides limited access to data via a number of freely available Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Studies in social media can be framed by drawing on a wide-variety of theories, constructs and conceptual frameworks from a wide-variety of disciplines. Twitter is one of the main social media platforms used to promote views and opinions of people and communities on a wide variety of topics. One particular strand on which there is a large amount of traffic within Twitter is politics, where views are expressed on news events that take place. Often these days, it is quite common that the news starts on Twitter rather than outside it. For these reasons Twitter data has become a good source of data for studying and evaluting attitudes towards political parties and for parties to express their views directly through this medium. Many studies based on Twitter data look to evaluate attitudes towards certain political parties through the mining of Twitter data produced by individuals.

We conducted a study using Twitter data collected from Party Political Candidates (PPC) in the lead up to the 12th December 2019 Elections. Our study focuses on how politicians use Twitter to promote their policies and opinions on particular topics. The data was collected through the Twitter API, which is a small sample selection of tweets from the total population of all tweets. This research concentrates on a quantative analysis of political party tweets and the retweets through a time series analysis during the month leading up to the General Election. This post summarises our preliminary findings.

We collected the Twitter account names for each of the Prospective Parlimentary Candidates (PPC) of the major parties, together with the official party Twitter account names (i.e. @Conservative, @LabourParty, and @LibDems), over the period from the 1st November to 6th December 2019. The proportion of PPC(s) with a Twitter account are summarised in Table 1, where we observed that there are more PPCs for the Liberal Democrats than any other party.

Analysing tweets using time series analysis

We summarised the number of tweets sent out by the PPC(s) and the number of times each tweet was retweeted to produce a raw time series on an hourly basis for each party, and a moving average with a window set to a 7 day period. The raw time series shows the distribution of tweets and retweets over time, whilst the moving average provides a method for identifying the weekly trend for each party.

How are the parties tweeting in the run-up to the election?

We first analysed the raw time series and the weekly trends for the number of tweets sent out by each party during the period. The average number of tweets and retweets generated by hour of the day for each party are presented in Table 2. The plots in Figure 1, show that the Conservatives tweet less compared to the other parties. The Liberal Democrats are shown to be tweeting in much higher volumes than any of the other parties, which is partially due to their larger number of PPCs, although the volume of tweets per day are fairly consistent across all parties. The raw time series also shows a noticeable spike across the parties, occurring on the 19th November. This was due to the large number of tweets and retweets on the topic of the Leader Debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, which was televised on ITV. A further spike appears in the Conservative time series on the 6th December, which was generated by Twitter activity on the topic of the head-to-head debate held in Maidstone on the BBC's prime ministerial debate. The weekly trends are fairly flat which indicates a relatively steady number of tweets throughout the month, the indication is that the trend is increasing towards the end of the election campaign.

Figure 1: The raw time series for the volume of tweets generated by each of the main parties (top), and the weekly trend for tweets (bottom).

The retweets reveal that the Conservative party tweets are being less retweeted compared to either Labour or the Liberal Democrats, with the Liberal Democrats receiving slightly more retweets compared to the other parties (see also Table 2 above). The weekly trends reveal interesting patterns. The number of retweets for the Conservative party seem fairly steady over the month, while the Labour and Liberal Democrat retweets are noticeably increasing; in particular, the Labour retweets are increasing at a much higher rate than those of the Liberal Democrats. This may indicate that there are many more active Labour supporters on Twitter; this warrants further investigation.

Figure 2: The raw time series for the volume of retweets received by each of the main parties (top), and the weekly trend for retweets (bottom).

What are the parties discussing on Twitter?

In order to understand the parties' topics of discussion on Twitter we extracted the hashtags from each tweet. (A hashtag is a short keyword preceeded by a '#', which allows the social media network to index the tweet so that it can be discoverable by users interested in similar topics who search for the hashtag, even if they’re not following the account.) We also looked at the most popular hashtags, and selected the top-5 most popular hashtags for tweets and retweets. The hashtags for the tweets indicate some of the main topics the parties have been promoting, and the retweets amplify some of these topics, and generate others.

The plot in Figure 4 and Figure 5 shows the volume of tweets, and the number of retweets for each of the top-5 hashtags per party, respectively. In Figure 4, we observe the main party campaign hashtags of "#GetBrexitDone" for the Conservatives, "#RealChange" from Labour, and the Liberal Democrats' "#StopBrexit". These are then followed by other party-specific hashtags, such as a call to action by the Conservatives in the form of "#VoteConservative", whereas both Labour and Liberal Democrats have opted for the more generic hashtag of "#GE2019" referring to the much broader topic of the General Election 2019, which appears further down in the Conservatives top hashtags. The picture is slightly different with respect to the most popular hashtags according to the number of retweets, as presented in Figure 5. Both the Conservative party and Liberal Democrats have a relatively low number of retweets over their official hashtags compared to the Labour Party. Aside from official party hashtags, we also see that across the parties the most retweeted hashtags are for recent televised debates, including "#LeadersDebate", "#ITVDebate", "#Marr", "#MarrShow", and "#bbcqt". In addition, we strangely find the hashtag "#RT" occurring amongst the most popular hashtags for the Liberal Democrats, which may be the result of creating new tweets from tweets prefixed with "RT" standing for a retweeted message. Twitter extracts characters "RT", from the original text and classifies it erroneously as a hashtag, this will be investigated further as the research develops.

Party Hashtags (tweets)

Figure 4: The top-5 hashtags included in tweets published by each party in descending order.

Party Hashtags (retweets)

Figure 5: The top-5 hashtags according to the number of retweets received by each party in descending order.

Monthly view of party hashtags (tweets)

We summarised the main hashtags contained in the tweets sent each day of the campaign by the various parties, and present them in Table 3. Among the entries we see the emergence of the most common hashtags (see Figure 4) over the course of the period. These represent the topics that the parties would like to draw attention to and we see that some are reintroduced over the course of the campaign, almost as a reminder of the key issues the parties would like us to keep at the forefront of our minds.

Monthly view of party hashtags (retweets)

In addition, we analysed the tweets according to how many retweets each tweet received given the hashtag, and report on the most retweeted hashtag for each day of the campaign by party in Table 4. The results show that some of the official party hashtags promoted by the various parties have been picked up by other Twitter accounts, with some hashtags related to the recent televised leadership debates and BBC Question Time. Interestingly, the top retweeted hashtags for Labour and Liberal Democrats vary and focus on some of the main topics that have been discussed such as the Labour manifesto, and the Liberal Democrat hashtag #DebateHer, which campaigns for Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn to debate the political issues with the Liberal Democrat candidate Jo Swinson.

On going work

Here we have described a work in progress, and are currently working on an in-depth analysis of the data, which may reveal more about the use of social media by politicians during the 2019 UK election campaign.

As part of the EU Code Week an EU Code event took place on 16th October organised by Dr Marija Katic and Emlyn Williams, both of whom are System Analysts/Developers in Birkbeck's ITS department. Several computer science students helped with the event.

Read more about EU Code Week 2019 at Birkbeck