With Pascal Jürgens [@pascal], and Harald Schoen I wrote a short blogpost for “Zweitstimme“, the blog formerly known as “Politik nach Zahlen”, a blog focused on empirical research on elections, hosted by the German newspaper Die Zeit. This time we focused on a phenomenon discussed in a study Pascal and I did on political twittering during the campaign for the federal election in Germany 2009. In “Alle Twitterer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher: Neue Gatekeeper und ihre Bedeutung für die Verbreitung von Nachrichten auf Twitter” we show the importance of highly connected users in Twitter conversation networks for the flow of political information through the whole conversation network.
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).