on Facebook and Twitter

As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elec-tions, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media plat-forms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parliament [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data wa