The viral diffusion of campaign messages about political issues during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

With candidates using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of their campaign strategies, social scientists are trying to understand the diffusion of political messages. Viral events can spread messages fast and far from the source, bringing candidate’s messages to new audiences and bringing new followers to candidates. To date, no studies have focused on understanding specifically what kinds of political issues the public spreads into their own networks. While the kinds of issues that spread will likely change from election to election, this work provides a comparison point for future work and is the first step in more real-time analysis that could be useful for researchers, journalists, and politicians. For this poster abstract we highlight part of our analysis, specifically, the frequency with which presidential candidates tweeted about specific issues and how the public responded by retweeting. To accomplish this, we use data visualization for exploratory data analysis. We find that that candidates and the public are most interested in different topics, but that both the public and candidates are more interested in advocacy messages than attack messages for every topic. For the final poster we will present analysis of both Facebook and Twitter, as well as confirmatory statistical analysis using regression modeling