Measuring citizen participation in South African public debates using Twitter: An exploratory study

Mwanza, Selvas and Suleman, Hussein (2016) Measuring citizen participation in South African public debates using Twitter: An exploratory study, Proceedings of Symposium on Information Management and Big Data 2016 (SIMBig 2016), 1-3 September 2016, Cusco, Peru, 26-34, CEUR.

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Abstract

This paper addresses the task of measuring Twitter social attributes that can be used for detecting patterns that show user participation in public debates in South African. We propose a method that leverages observable information on Twitter such as use of language, retweeting user behaviour, and the relationship between topics and the user social network graph. Our experimental results suggest high degrees of citizen participation: people in an otherwise multilingual country tweet in a dominant language; there is more original commentary and interactive discussion; and topics often span natural online communities.

Item Type: Conference paper
Subjects: Information systems > Information retrieval
Alternate Locations: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1743/paper2.pdf
Date Deposited: 17 Feb 2017
Last Modified: 10 Oct 2019 15:32
URI: http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1163

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