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Abstract
This article provides empirical insights into how one online service – Twitter – was used for political purposes during three separate election campaigns in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, specifically how Twitter users, with hyperlinks, connect with other channels for political communication. Methodologically, the study employs three large sets of data on Twitter use tagged as relevant for each of the election campaigns, covering a one-month period. The approach allows for an untangling of the complex interconnections between novel online services, mainstream media, official political party websites, public information, individual blogs and social network sites. By moving beyond a study merely of the type of websites linked to, to also include classification of the actors publishing the content linked to, the article provides insights into the actual use by politicians, interest groups as well as grassroots activists of diverse Web genres.
Notes
As hashtags were used to guide data collection in the present study, Twitter content not tagged accordingly was not included in our archiving processes. It should also be noted that yourTwapperKeeper only collects tweets with unique URLs, which excludes so-called automatic retweets (for further discussion of the method for data collection, see Bruns Citation2011; Larsson & Moe Citation2012).
Except for the #val2010 archive, collections of all archives were mirrored on two servers and then compared using a script-based tool to reveal potential discrepancies between them and to rule out technical glitches. Results showed no more than 0.25 percent deviation in any archive.
Periods for data collection: Sweden: 19 August to 22 September 2010, Norway 12 August to 15 September 2011 and Denmark 15 August to 18 September 2011.
A number of links in the data sets were not categorized for two reasons: they were either incomplete or pointed to webpages inaccessible at the time of coding (late 2011). In the Danish case, this concerned 0.37 percent of the links, in the Norwegian 0.26 percent and in the Swedish 4.5 percent. The reason for the considerably higher number in the latter case is most probably the longer time-lag from initial publication as tweets to coding, combined with the fact that some of these services (e.g. Twitter's use of default photo-sharing service as well as an in-house URL shortener) had matured and were more stable during the 2011 campaigns.