How to Read this Dashboard
This project attempts to give an overview of the online political landscape in Germany. It is a live dashboard, which collects and analyzes political content from Twitter, Facebook and 40 online news media sources. The dashboard tries to: 1. Locate and present
the trending political topics discussed in Germany online. 2. Provide insights on the attitudes and political interests of online partisan users. Each page of the dashboard is platform specific and contains illustrative plots and
graphs. For a detailed discussion on the data collection process, on the creation of the plots, and on the limitations of the dashboard’s methodology, read here. Note: The results
presented on this dashboard might not replicate the full online interactions.
Tweets in the database in the last seven days
Trending Hashtags
From all the tweets, this plot shows the top ten used hashtags in the last 24 hours. By hovering over the plot, you can see how long these hashtags have been on this list. The typography of the text helps to identify two types of
hashtags:
Biased hashtags: These are hashtags that we follow to collect tweets. This means that we explicitly search for them in the platform, and acquire any tweets linked to them.
Unbiased hashtags: They appear in bold letters. We don’t follow these hashtags. They appear here since they reflect the popular topics in the last 24 hours.
Trending URLs
The URLs presented here are the most shared URLs in the tweets from the last 24 hours. We discard all URLs related to other tweets, Facebook posts, Youtube videos, Instagram photos and Google/Bing searches in order to focus on
political-relevant media stories. The search bar allows searching for specific sources or keywords in the URLs.
Party Specific Hashtags
The following plots show the top ten used hashtags in the last 24 hours by supporters of German political parties. We define a supporter as a user that has retweeted the official Twitter account of the party five times or
more. The seven political parties are those currently governing in the parliament. Again the hashtags are divided into biased hashtags and unbiased hashtags.
CDU
CSU
SPD
AfD
FDP
Die Linke
Die Grünen
Hashtag Comparison Between Parties
Similarly to the first plot, this spider plot shows the top ten hashtags in the last 24 hours. It further represents how much the supporters of each party are using these ten hashtags. We define a supporter as a user that
has retweeted the official Twitter account of the party five times or more. Each color-shape on the plot corresponds to a German party and it intersects the lines corresponding to the hashtags. For one hashtag, the dots closer to the
outer circle tell us that the supporters of these parties are proportionally sharing the hashtag more often than the supporters of the other parties. If all the dots for one hashtag are close to the center, the supporters of all
parties are discussing this hashtag in similar quantities. Note: To be able to compare the hashtags between different parties, we normalized the hashtag counts by the number of tweets per party. This is necessary since the supporters
of some party tweet more often than those of another party.