Politicians are highly public individuals. A lot of data on them is available online. Many try to use social media such as Twitter to express their views, support other members of their party or interest groups, and interact with the public. Some also use it to branch out and connect to other countries’ politicians or respond to international events. With all of this, they form social graphs with them as nodes and their interactions as edges. A politician’s job, however, also often comes with balancing different interests, especially in times of uncertainty; this may lead to changing opinions based on the current state of events. However, as they try to influence the public on social media, other actors may use their posts to do the same or influence the politicians themselves.
Thesis Type |
|
Student |
Maximilian Kissgen |
Status |
Finished |
Proposal on |
21/12/2022 10:30 am |
Proposal room |
Seminar room I5 6202 |
Presentation on |
23/06/2023 10:30 am |
Presentation room |
Seminar room I5 6202 |
Supervisor(s) |
Stefan Decker |
Advisor(s) |
Alexander Neumann |
Contact |
neumann@dbis.rwth-aachen.de |
The war in Ukraine presents a dynamic scenario of political polarization that is acted out on the battlefield and the Internet. Politicians are forced to take sides in a rapidly changing situation and both war parties may use social media to convince them or the public of their side, for example, through large amounts of bot comments on Twitter threads.
This thesis aims to collect contextual information on European politicians from the semantic web and their tweets related to the Ukraine war on Twitter to create a social graph. Using the graph, communities and the interaction should be analyzed. In addition to the collection, another task is to determine the response the politicians get from bots on Twitter and the positions they take regarding the war parties.
By extending the open-source graph analysis framework WebOCD, the visualization of changes in communities and graph structure over time should be implemented. Furthermore, the effects of certain events during the war should be examined as an example.