A Social Network Analysis Overview of Turkish Political Communication Competition on Twitter

Abstract

One of the primary purposes of political communication research is to determine the position of the public on any political issue. It is now possible to gather and evaluate information about people's political lives from a sizable data pool around the globe. In the newly emerging field known as Computational Social Sciences, computer science is employed to acquire and analyze these data. Through the emergence of a trend on social media, Turkey has recently witnessed a race between supporters of the ruling party and opposition groupings. In this study, two pro-government and pro-opposition trends (On Twitter) were taken into account when conducting social network analyses. Data were obtained from Twitter. According to the research, the pro-government trend spread at a rate of 155 tweets per hour, while the opposition-supported trend expanded at a rate of 127 tweets per hour. The graphs' observations show that spreading the opposition trend involves the usage of fake accounts more frequently than spreading the government-supporting trend. However, it has been observed that fake accounts are effective in the opening and course of both trends. Accordingly, it is thought that fake accounts seriously contribute to trend formation on Twitter.