User Roles in Online Political Discussion: A Typology based on Twitter Data from the German Federal Election 2017 by Henner Gimpel, Florian Haamann, Manfred Schoch, Marcel Wittich In: Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Portsmouth, UK, June 2018, 8 University of Augsburg, D-86135 Augsburg Visitors: Universitätsstr. 12, 86159 Augsburg Phone: +49 821 598-4801 (Fax: -4899) 743 University of Bayreuth, D-95440 Bayreuth - I Visitors: Wittelsbacherring 10, 95444 Bayreuth W Phone: +49 921 55-4710 (Fax: -844710) www.fim-rc.de USER ROLES IN ONLINE POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS: A TYPOLOGY BASED ON TWITTER DATA FROM THE GERMAN FEDERAL ELECTION 2017 Research paper Gimpel, Henner, FIM Research Center, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany,
[email protected] Haamann, Florian, FIM Research Center, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany,
[email protected] Schoch, Manfred, FIM Research Center, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany,
[email protected] Wittich, Marcel, FIM Research Center, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany,
[email protected] Abstract Twitter is well recognized as a microblogging site, an online social network (OSN), and increasingly as a digital news platform. With the changing media usage behavior over the past decade, political actors have now recognized the need to enrich their election campaign efforts by including social media strat- egies. However, previous research has shown that users behave heterogeneously in online political dis- cussions. To better understand how users behave and interact in such debates, we conduct an explora- tory study to identify emergent user roles from Twitter data. We develop a dynamic selection query to collect a representative data set on the German federal election of 2017.