Event Analysis on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Using Social Media

摘要

It is not surprising that social media have played an important role in shaping the political debate during the 2016 presidential election. The dynamics of social media provide a unique opportunity to detect and interpret the pivotal events and scandals of the candidates quantitatively. This paper examines several text-based analysis to determine which topics have a lasting impact on the election for the two main candidates, Clinton and Trump. About 135.5 million tweets are collected over the six weeks prior to the election. From these tweets, topic clustering, keyword extraction, and tweeter analysis are performed to better understand the impact of the events occurred during this period. Our analysis builds upon a social science foundation to provide another avenue for scholars to use in discerning how events detected from social media show the impacts of campaigns as well as campaign the election.