Analysis of Twitter and YouTube during USelections 2020

Authors:
  • ASAlexander Shevtsov
    Alexander Shevtsov
  • MOMaria Oikonomidou
    Maria Oikonomidou
  • DADespoina Antonakaki
    Despoina Antonakaki
  • PPPolyvios Pratikakis
    Polyvios Pratikakis
  • SISotiris Ioannidis
    Sotiris Ioannidis
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Abstract
The upcoming November 2020 presidential elections in the United States have caused extensive discussions on social media. A part of the content on US elections is organic, coming from users discussing their opinions of the candidates, political positions, or relevant content presented on television. Another significant part of the content generated originates from organized campaigns, both official and by astroturfing. In this study, we obtain approximately 7.5M tweets, containing 1.4M users, based on prevalent hashtags related to US election 2020, as well as the related YouTube links, contained in the Twitter dataset, likes, dislikes and comments of the videos and conduct volume, sentiment and graph analysis on the communities formed. Particularly, we study the daily traffic per prevalent hashtags and show the evolution of the retweet graph from July to September 2020, highlighting the two main entities ('Biden' and 'Trump') contained in our dataset. The results of sentiment analysis indicate that 45.7 express positive sentiment towards Trump in Twitter and 33.8 positive sentiment towards Biden, while 14.55 of users express positive sentiment in YouTube metadata gathered towards Trump and 8.7 positive sentiment towards Biden.

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