Understanding How People Use Twitter During Election Debates

During televised election debates, it is now common for citizens to take to social media to express their own opinions. Within this paper, we present a thematic analysis of the tweets generated during a debate from the 2015 UK General Election. The aim of this work is to explore the visible online behaviour seen on Twitter. We argue that by exploring what types of tweets emerge regardless of their political affiliation, we will gain a deeper understanding of citizen’s behaviours online during live debates. We observed that citizens use Twitter to commentate along by sharing their opinions, experiences, make provocative or humorous statements, and interact and inform others