We first happened upon the idea that certain users, based on their position in conversation networks of politically interested users, were able to keep political information from reaching specific sections of the network in a paper on the use of Twitter during the run up to the German federal election of 2009, Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009 [Preprint]. In that paper we called these users New Gatekeepers in reference to the Gatekeeper concept in mass communication research.

We met the New Gatekeepers again in a blogpost for the ZEIT blog Zweitstimme. In the post “Alle Twitterer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher: Neue Gatekeeper und ihre Bedeutung für die Verbreitung von Nachrichten auf Twitter” we constructed a network based on Twitter conversations between politically vocal users during one day. We showed that the unity of the network depended critically on a few well connected users. Once we excluded these users from the network it scattered into many isolated components. This shows that these users, because of their position in the structure of the network, are vital for the distribution of information to different sections of the network.

Conversation network of politically interested Twitter users on 9/1/2009

In “Small Worlds with a Difference: New Gatekeepers and the Filtering of Political Information on Twitter” we decided to look for a specific metric in quantitative social network analysis that corresponded with our interpretation of New Gatekeepers and to check if users existed in our network that corresponded with said metric. We ended up using a concept based on work by Stephen Borgatti (2005) and Daniel Ortiz-Arroyo (2010). Based on their reasoning we decided to identify those nodes in the network whose exclusion had the strongest impact on the entropy of the whole network. Our analysis showed that the exclusion of only a few nodes critically impacts the entropy of the network. For us this is an indicator for the ability of a small number of users to effectively filter the flow of information on Twitter.

For a more detailed discussion of this and the bias these users showed in their Twitter activities please have a look at the paper. Please let us know what you think of the concept and its operationalization in the context of social network analysis.

[Update: 2011/06/21]
Meanwhile Pascal has uploaded his presentation.

Also, our contribution was mentioned in “The Science of the Web” by David De Roure [@dder] on his nature network blog eResearch.

[Update: 2011/07/21]
Pascal’s presentation has been posted as a video on videolectures.net [Video: Small Worlds with a Difference: New Gatekeepers and the Filtering of Political Information on Twitter]

Further Reading:
Stephen P. Borgatti (2005) ‘Centrality and network flow’, Social Networks 27, 55-71. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2004.11.008.

Andreas Jungherr, Pascal Jürgens and Harald Schoen (2011) ‘Alle Twitterer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher: Neue Gatekeeper und ihre Bedeutung für die Verbreitung von Nachrichten auf Twitter’ Zweitstimme.

Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2011) ‘Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009’, in: Eva Johanna Schweitzer and Steffen Albrecht (eds.), Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-92853-1_8.

Pascal Jürgens, Andreas Jungherr and Harald Schoen (2011) ‘Small Worlds with a Difference: New Gatekeepers and the Filtering of Political Information on Twitter’. Paper presented at the conference ‘ACM WebSc ’11: 3rd International Conference on Web Science’ Koblenz, Germany on 14-17 June. [pdf at the conference's website]

Daniel Ortiz-Arroyo (2010) ‘Discovering Sets of Key Players in Social Networks’, in: Abraham, A., Hassanien, A.-E., and Snásel , V. (eds.). Computational Social Network Analysis. Springer Verlag, Dordrecht et al., 27-46. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-229-0_2.

Eva Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Hrsg.): Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009

Just got news that Eva Schweitzer’s and Steffen Albrecht’s edited volume “Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009” is out. The book collects papers that address different aspects of the internet’s role in the campaign for the German general election of 2009. Pascal Jürgens and I contributed a paper on the use of Twitter during the campaign called “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″ [SpringerLink] [preprint in German].

The collection offers a broad perspective on the state of political internet use in Germany. It also contains interesting pieces by Steffen Albrecht who writes about blogs, Jesscia Kunert and Jan Schmidt who write about social networking sites, Thorsten Faas and Julia Partheymüller who write on political internet use in Germany, Thomas Roessing and Nicole Podschuweit who focus on political uses of Wikipedia, Christoph Bieber who comments on the role of online tools in the overall party campaigning strategies and Eva Schweitzer who focuses on political websites during the campaign. There are many other interesting articles in this collection so if you are interested in the topic be sure to check it out.

Conversation network of politically interested Twitter users on 9/1/2009

As shown above these highly interconnected individuals are crucial for the information flow through the network of politically interested Twitter users. For a more comprehensive discussion of this idea please see the blogpost or our forthcoming paper Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2011) “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″, in: Eva Johanna Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Eds.), Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag (forthcoming).

More on that here.

It started on 27 August with Redes sociales, escaparate político by Karina Gómez Pernas in the Mexican publication Vanguardia, moved to Panama on September 5 as ¿Escaparate político? on the site prensa.com. Then on September 12 the item makes its rounds to Argentina on the website Democracia.com and is on the same day published in Spain. Only to appear on September 13 in Ecuador Redes Sociales, escaparate político on Pichincha al Día. Finally on September 18 the item appears in Brasil as 1ª Edição – Twitter: ferramenta tem papel importante para as democracias.

Seems I’m running out of excuses to travel the Spanish speaking world.

[Update: 2010/09/22]
The item appeared also here:
Redes sociales, escaparate político at El Sol Online (Argentino)
Las redes sociales, un escaparate político at Prodigy MSN (Spain)

If you are interested in the campaign, I also wrote about it here, here and here.

The workshop was organized by Julia H. Grace [@jewelia], Dejin Zhao [@djzaho] and danah boyd [@zephoria]. It was a great experience and very interesting to discuss the research challenges that microblogging poses with an international and highly interdisciplinary crowd of researchers. I‘ll post my thoughts on the workshop later this day. In this post I‘ll make my presentation and the rough draft of my talk available.

Since I tend to speak freely in presentations this draft might not be exactly what I said, still it should be pretty close. Anyhow this talk was meant as an appetizer to the position paper on the same topic. So, if you‘re looking for something to cite, kindly have a look at said position paper.

Twitter in Politics: Lessons Learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009

by Andreas Jungherr

Draft v.1.0
2010/04/13

In this ignite talk I want to take you on a short trip through my position paper Twitter in Politics: Lessons Learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009, so that by the end of this presentation, you‘ll have an idea on how and why the German party CDU used Twitter in the campaigns of 2009 like it did.

2009 was a special year for political campaigners in Germany. This had two reasons:

One was the relative high density of high-profile elections in this year. In 2009 there were elections in five important Bundesländern, elections to the European parliament, the election of the German Bundespräsident and in autumn, the German general election.This lead to the term Superwahljahr – the year of the super election.

The second reason was Barack Obama, or rather the things Obama did to win the US presidential election, or rather the things the media thought he was doing to win the election.

The German media was quick to identify the microblogging service Twitter as a key element to Obama‘s victory. And while one can find good reasons to disagree with their assessment, Twitter suddenly became the thing to do for up and coming politicians.

As anyone knows who worked with politicians, politicians tend to be like kids with regard to the adoption of knew technology. At first they want nothing to do with anything new, but when the cool kids are flashing a new toy there is nothing more important to them than to possess exactly THAT toy. This is exactly what happened with regard to Twitter in the German political scene from late 2008 onwards.

During 2008 most German politicians kept as far away from Twitter as humanly possible only to flock to the service in the aftermath of the press-storm about the online magic the Obama campaign managed to conjure up. In late 2008 and early 2009 many German politicians regardless of party and age found their inner Twitterer – or the inner Twitterer of a lucky staff member – and started a Twitter account.

This led to considerable concern in all parties since suddenly the campaigns had a social media component that was new to German campaigns. Fortunately the high frequency of campaigns in 2009 proved to be very fortunate for exactly this challenge. Campaigns on the state and European level could be used as prototypes for elements of social media campaigning. So by the time the national campaign went into its hot phase most German parties had had the chance to get acquainted with social media and incorporate it in some way in their grand strategy.

This proved to be a very interesting time to work for political campaigns in Germany. In early 2009 I entered the campaign to reelect the Ministerpräsident of Hessia, Roland Koch. During that campaign my work focused pretty much on the use of Twitter by our online campaign, the webcamp09. Later that year I entered the national campaign for the general elections. There I also worked on the use of Twitter by the campaign but I also worked on the approach the campaign took to social media in general.

This already hints at the way the CDU treated their campaigns in the Bundesländer. These campaigns were not isolated but were used as test cases and prototypes for the use of Twitter and social media in general. Two of the most valuable prototypes for the national campaign proved to be the online campaigns in the Bundesländern Hessia and Saarland. Both campaigns centered their online campaigns with their respective volunteer campaigns, the webcamp09 and the Peter Müller Team 09. Both campaigns used Twitter feeds under the names [@webcamp09] and [@pmt09]. The experiences with these accounts led the national campaign to start a Twitter feed [@teAMDeutschland]. And in turn the lessons learned during the campaign for the general elections in 2009 led to the way the campaign to reelect the Ministerpräsident Jürgen Rüttgers uses their Twitter account [@nrwruettgers] in early 2010, a campaign which I advise on their online activities.

So which were some of the lessons learned? Twitter proved a very important tool to do some classic community building. The Twitter feeds [@webcamp09] and [@teAMDeutschland] were both used to get online supporters in contact with each other and to react to their comments or critiques.

Twitter proved to be a very successful channel for the distribution of social objects (after Hugh MacLeod). Most of the time these social objects were not content designed by the campaign but content that was either created by supporters or party candidates who strayed from the official CI.

Twitter proved also to be a very useful backchannel to campaign events. It was possible for supporters and critics alike to follow and comment on campaign events, political TV shows or the debate between Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel and the SPD candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier through Twitter. This proved to be valuable addition to classical campaign events.

Still, the experiences with Twitter during the campaign were not completely unproblematic. One of the biggest issues raised through the widespread adoption of Twitter was a sudden surge in negative campaigning. The content that was distributed the widest through Twitter was mostly negative in nature or contained attacks on the the political opponent. This was true for all political parties. This leads to fundamental questions about the political use of social media and how we can avoid that widespread political use of social media leads to a surge in negative campaigning.

So how are the Twitter efforts of these campaigns to be evaluated. Did they decide the election? Probably not. Personally I think the most important element in the political twittering of 2009 was the active learning process that it started in the party CDU. In the final account it is nor all that important which campaign did use Twitter the best or had the most followers. In the end it matters which political party is able after a campaign to clearly articulate lessons learned and to establish processes that guarantee perpetual learning and prototyping to ensure that said party keeps in contact with its online supporters and online critics.

This was a little appetizer to the content covered in the position paper. For a more detailed discussion of the issues raised in this presentation please have a look at the position paper itself.

Thank you.

There are two ways to access this paper:
1. One as a pdf in the original CHI layout.
2. Second right here in plain html which might be easier for reading on the screen.

Still, I would be grateful that if you want to cite the paper you’d use the pdf version as authoritative.

Also, I posted the ignite talk on this blog in which I sketched this paper at the CHI2010 workshop on microblogging.

Twitter in Politics: Lessons Learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009

Abstract
In this position paper I discuss the impact of microblogging on political communication in Germany. Also, I will present lessons learned on how political actors can use microblogging services in their campaigns. These lessons are based on my work for the German CDU during two major election campaigns in 2009.

Introduction
2009 was the year in which microblogging became a relevant phenomenon in the German political sphere. The reason for this was the high frequency of elections in 2009. It proved to be a good year for political actors to experiment with new communication tools. Various elections on the German federal level and the election of the European parliament led the way to the German general election in September 2009. This high frequency of elections led to the term ‘Superwahljahr’ (year of the super election).

2009 witnessed the rapid adoption of the microblogging service Twitter by politicians, political parties and political supporters in Germany. The reason for this explosion of political Twitter feeds lies in overenthusiastic reports on the internet-success of the Obama campaign. These reports made Twitter the new must-have-item in each up-and-coming politician’s campaigning toolbox. More often than not the desire of politicians to use Twitter, or better, the desire of politicians to be seen using Twitter, led to public ridicule. Even the most skilled political microbloggers were prone to missteps. One well-publicized example is the case of Members of Parliament Ulrich Kelber and Julia Klöckner who twittered the result of the German Bundespräsidentenwahl from the floor of the house minutes before the result was officially pronounced [1]. This and other incidents led to very critical discussions of Twitter and microblogging in general. While this introduced a welcome dose of pragmatism in the debate today the tendency is to declare microblogging as inconsequential and the realm of childish hipsters and self-marketing gurus [5]. This pessimistic view does not correspond with the experiences political parties and politicians made with Twitter. In this position paper I want to discuss the applications of microblogging in politics and present some of the lessons learned during the Superwahljahr 2009.

To do so I base my observations on my own campaign activities for the German party CDU. I worked for the CDU during two mayor campaigns – Hessia 2009 and the campaign to reelect chancellor Angela Merkel in the German general elections 2009. In these campaigns my focus was on online campaigning and the use of social media channels.

Twitter in Politics
During 2009 the microblogging service Twitter has been widely adopted by the political set in Germany. Since then different variations of political twittering emerged. There were Twitter feeds by:

- politicians
- political parties
- official campaign accounts
- private feeds by political supporters

While all these exhibit different characteristics and bring with them different issues for a political campaign, there are a number of lessons learned and open questions that apply to all these political Twitter accounts.

Lessons Learned
During different campaigns in 2009 we found successful ways to use microblogging in political communication. These uses can be collected under three categories. It is important to know that we did not start with the intention of using microblogging to achieve theses tasks. Still, during our microblogging activities they emerged as the most successful usage patterns.

Microblogging as community building
At the beginning of 2009 CDU campaigns faced an online public sphere in which only a minority of CDU supporters voiced their opinions. The online supporters were few and for the most part not interconnected. The official Twitter feeds of our campaigns (@webcamp09 and @teamdeutschland) served as hubs through which online supporters could find each other and interact. We used the Twitter conventions @message and RT very consciously to foster this interaction between political supporters. In this way our microblogging feeds became tools for successful community building.

Microblogging as distribution channel for social objects
During the campaigns we found that objects like campaign posters, poster remixes, videos or links to articles were in and of itself of little importance. What mattered was the interaction of our supporters around these objects. This corresponds with the theory of the role of social objects in social media [4]. Our microblogging feeds proved to be ideal channels to point the attention of our supporters to objects on the web that might illicit further interactions among them. This use also led to a strengthening of our community building efforts through microblogging feeds.

Microblogging as communication backchannel to political events
The role of microblogging as a communication backchannel to social events has been often discussed in its positive and negative aspects [2]. During our campaigns, microblogging feeds proved to be useful communication backchannels. Be it for campaign events, which supporters at the event broadcasted through their Twitter feeds, or be it as backchannels to traditional media events (i.e. TV debates, discussion rounds or political documentaries) through which supporters discussed the events or their reactions to it. During the campaigns we made no experiences with disruptive effects of microblogging backchannels.

Open Questions
Although political actors increasingly come to terms with Twitter there remain open questions that have to be addressed if microblogging shall be used constructively in political communication:

Negativity reappears with a vengeance
Negative campaigning was always one of the more ugly aspects of political campaigns. This aspect achieves new prominence through the adoption of social media and microblogging. Experience shows that the most successful content – the content that gets distributed widely over microblogging feeds or creates the most buzz – is negative in nature or a direct attack on the political competitor. If microblogging should grow in importance for political communication this tendency towards negativity has to be consciously addressed.

Expectation management
All participants have to form more realistic and explicit expectations to the uses and desired effects of microblogging. Politicians have to be clear about what they want to achieve with their microblogging activities and how to evaluate those. The public and the media have to form expectations about constructive political microblogging. For political microblogging to emerge as a constructive element in political communication, it is not sufficient to discuss whether ‘Angela Merkel pokes back’ on Facebook or on similar platforms [6]. Finally one has to accept the realities that online activities of political actors will always be more intensive in times of political campaigns. If after elections online activities decline it is not necessarily a sign of an ‘offline autumn’ [3] but of consolidation of communication activities and a reevaluation which of these activities are sustainable during times of lower resources and different political challenges.

Embrace the Fail Whale
An active presence on Twitter by a party or a politician means that mistakes will happen. Be it directly if a political actor mistweets or indirectly when statements of a political supporter get quoted as the actual party line. If society asks of parties and politicians to open up the process of political communication, society and the media have to become more tolerant to the mistakes that will happen along the way.

Caveat
In 2009 German parties tried different approaches to the use of microblogging feeds during campaigns. The lessons presented in this position paper are based on my work for the German party CDU. These lessons therefore might be different from an analysis that would be grounded in experiences collected during work for other parties. Be that as it may, I hope these lessons might serve as a conversation starter to deepen our understanding of the function of microblogging in politics.

Acknowledgements
I thank Pascal Jürgens for much appreciated critical advice. Also I want to thank the inhabitants of the @hessenwg Dirk Koch, Alexander Kurz and Sina Marzisnki. Without those three the Superwahljahr 2009 would have been much longer and would have seemed a lot more like real work.

Citations
[1] Boie, J.: Das Zwitschern der Weinkönigin. sueddeutsche.de. 2009/05/26. .
[2] boyd, d.: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective.
[3] König, M.: Der deutsche Offline-Herbst. sueddeutsche.de. 2009/10/13.
[4] MacLeod, H.: more thoughts on social objects. gapingvoid.
[5] Meckel, M., Stanoevska-Slabeva, K.: Auch Zwitschern muss man üben: Wie Politiker im deutschen Bundestagswahlkampf ‘twitterten’. Neue Zürcher Zeitung. 2009/11/10.
[6] Sagatz, K.: Gruscheln mit Angela. Der Tagesspiegel. 2009/04/28.

During the workshop I will present my position paper Twitter in Politics: Lessons learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009 in a short Ignite Talk. Although I have a narrative in mind which could fill the presentation I want to give the old unknown unknown a chance. Therefore I want to ask you which are the points you would be interested in hearing in an Ignite Talk about a paper called “Twitter in Politics: Lessons learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009?”