Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences j 2018 Analysis of the Twitter Interactions during the Impeachment of Brazilian President Fabrício Olivetti de França, Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado Denise Hideko Goya Federal University of ABC, CECS, Federal University of ABC, CMCC, Nuvem Research Strategic Unit Nuvem Research Strategic Unit [email protected] [email protected], [email protected] Abstract was noticed the existence of Social Media Teams The impeachment process that took place in Brazil (“digital vanguards”) the act like coordinators for the on April, 2016, generated a large amount of posts on process of communication of digital accounts. As an Internet Social Networks. These posts came from example, during Occupy Wall Street, some users had a ordinary people, journalists, traditional and larger importance regarding the spreading of ideas independent media, politicians and supporters. acting as hubs [4] and playing a role of primary Interactions among users, by sharing news or opinions, influential [7]. can show the dynamics of communication inter and In [8] it was found that SNS like Facebook and intra groups. This paper proposes a method for social Twitter has a positive effect on personal interactions networks interactions analysis by using motifs, and mobilization process, however, this medium also frequent interactions patterns in network. This method reinforces the distinction of different groups, allowing is then applied to analyze data extracted from Twitter a rise of conflicts and hate speech, contributing to the during the voting for the impeachment of the Brazilian lack of trust between groups. president. Results of this analysis highlight the Such a scenario promotes the occurrence of a social behavior of some users by retweeting each other to phenomenon known as homophily, defined as the increase the importance of their opinion or to reach tendency of similar people to form ties with each other, visibility. In addition, interaction patterns reveal that at a higher rate than among dissimilar people [9]. messages from one group (against/in favor of Homophily limits social worlds and the information impeachment) rarely propagate to the opposing group. received by an individual. Political content to which As such, this brings evidence that Social Networks may each user is exposed becomes restricted to its own not stimulate a debate, but reaffirm users’ beliefs. points of view [10]. This natural restriction of the information flow within a specific group produces 1. Introduction shared political attitudes which can result in political polarization [11, 12]. The authors of the last three cited works identified The outbreak of Arab Spring [1] drew attention to a formation of clusters by analyzing interactions the political potential of Social Network Sites (SNS). networks on Twitter, involving posts in political Castells in [2] pointed out the emergence of a new themes. There were clusters in both followers networks model for political demonstrations that uses SNS to [10, 11] and mentions network [12], with some create a network of outrage and hope with the goal of evidence of homophily, although cross-ideological articulating minds, create meaning and contest the interactions between different clusters were observed, institutional power. suggesting a coexistence of a public sphere, where a Studies from different political demonstrations like diversity of opinion can interact. In [11] was found Arab Spring, Indignados [3], and Occupy Wall Street higher levels of homophily in reciprocated followers [4] showed that the communication has an important network (where each relationship between a pair of role in the organizational structure of the users is symmetric) than in non-reciprocated network demonstrations, thus emerging a connective action (with users being followed by those who does not logic that characterizes by the use of SNS to promote follow them back). personalized engagement [5]. Visibility is crucial to achieving symbolic power, Even though the connective action operates in a defined as “the capacity to intervene in the course of decentralized paradigm and leaderlessness, in [6] it URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/50140 Page 2005 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-1-9 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) events and influence the actions of others by means of RQ1. “During this specific event, do different groups the production and transmission of symbolic forms” create natural clusters preventing the information [13]. In [14] it was showed that self-organized flow between different groups?” movement participants used strategies to leverage RQ2. “Do central users create a pattern of interactions social media to better diffuse their message and in order to reinforce their opinion and to strengthen enhance their symbolic power by combining the use of their position in the dispute?” different hashtags to reach distinct social circles. The work in [15] describes information cascade This paper addresses these questions relative only phenomenon, where there is an optimal point for an to this specific event, while letting a full analysis for individual, by observing the choices of previous future research when data from different events are individuals, decides to ignore its own conflicting available. information and to adopt the trending idea. It is known In order to answer these questions, firstly it is that central users play a key role for information established a measure for top influential users by the diffusion in SNS [16]. An interesting investigation number of their interactions. After that, it is introduced would be to look for evidence of relations between a new method to understand the dynamics of these centrality of users and their strategies to gain visibility interactions by inspecting frequent patterns called and increase the adoption of their ideas. motifs [21]. As a result, the contribution of this work is a new 1.1. Case Context method to understand the interactions between groups of common and opposed opinions and some evidences In June of 2013 Brazil witnessed a first wave of toward how people make use of SNS environment to protests mobilized by the use of Internet social reinforce their opinions. networks. These protests led millions of Brazilians to The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a the streets requesting better public services and brief description for the adopted SNS and the changes to the discredited democratic institutions [17]. performed procedures. In Section 3 the collected data A second wave of protests using SNS started in set is analyzed, and in Section 4 are presented some 2015 with demonstrations against corruption and final remarks and perspectives for future work. demanding the impeachment of the just reelected Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff [18, 19]. 2. Methodology During the years of 2015 and 2106, groups in favor and against Rousseff’s government promoted several This section briefly describes the Twitter Social political discussions on SNS [20]. Network, highlighting concepts of interest for this In midst of an economic and political crisis, research followed by the data collection method. After Brazilian lower house started the impeachment process that, metrics of user importance are described and, on April 17th 2016, with 376 out of 511 of the finally, a new method for analyzing groups’ congressmen votes in favor of this process. interactions is proposed. This day had a great visibility in traditional media and an intensive usage of SNS by groups in favor and 2.1. Twitter Social Network contrary to the impeachment. These groups tried to advocate their political position: the first commented Twitter Social Network [22] is a directed network several corruption scandals the president was accused with each node representing one user and the of, and the second questioned the validity of such relationships modeled after a directional interaction process and denounced that, in fact, a coup was in between two users. Given two users, A and B, a progress. directed edge from A to B means that A follows B. With the objective of understanding the In this particular Social Network there is no need contemporary public debate, more specifically in a for a follower to be followed back, and thus non- strong political polarization context, we will study the reciprocated networks could be formed. debate between groups in favor and against the Every user is free to post a short message regarding impeachment of the former Brazilian president Dilma any subject to be broadcasted to its followers (and, Rousseff. As such, we pose two research questions: sometimes, the followers of its followers). The main interaction of this network is called retweet in which a Page 2006 given user broadcasts a message that was originally The keywords used in this work are listed in Table 1 posted by someone else. and they are grouped as those commonly used by the With this retweeting action, a given message can group in favor of the impeachment (Pro), contrary to reach any user of network, without the restriction of the impeachment (Con) and by both groups (Both). having to follow the original poster. Notice that these terms were manually selected by observing the main active groups from each side. In 2.2. Data Collection Portuguese, words such as “Fora and “NuncaMais” means “Go away” and “Never more”; those were used The data collection comprehends the period of to form hashtags used by groups in favor of the April 15 to April 19 of 2016. This period corresponds impeachment. The word “Golpe” means “coup” and to two days prior and after the voting, respectively. For was one of the main words adopted by users against this purpose, the Twitter Streaming API the impeachment process. (http://dev.twitter.com) provides a continuous flow of During this period, it was collected 2,372,914 tweets limited to 1% of the total amount of tweets tweets from 503,181 different users containing at least being published globally at every time step [23].
Details
-
File Typepdf
-
Upload Time-
-
Content LanguagesEnglish
-
Upload UserAnonymous/Not logged-in
-
File Pages8 Page
-
File Size-