Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse relationships and communication between Twitter actors in Swedish political conversations. More specifically, the paper aims to identify the most prominent actors, among these actors identify the sub-groups of actors with similar political affiliations, and describe and analyse the relationships and communication between these sub-groups. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected during four weeks in September 2012, using Twitter API. The material included 77,436 tweets from 10,294 Twitter actors containing the hashtag #svpol. In total, 916 prominent actors were identified and categorised according to the main political blocks, using information from their profiles. Social network analysis was utilised to map the relationships and the communication between these actors. Findings – There was a marked dominance of the three main political blocks among the 916 most prominent actors: left block, centre-right block, and right-wing block. Th...
['David Gunnarsson Lorentzen']
Polarisation in political Twitter conversations