AMCAP Journal of Media and Communication Studies - Lahore

Journal of Media and Communication Studies

Association of Media and Communication Academic Professionals (AMCAP)
ISSN (online): 2789-9756

Politico-Twitterial Tug of War: Analysis of Tweets Posted by Party Leaders during General Election-2018 Pakistan

  • Rashid Ali Khuhro/
  • Bashir Memon/
  • Muhammad Yasir Gill/
  • Mohsin Hassan Khan/
  • February 10, 2021
Keywords
Twitter, Political Tweets, Politics in Pakistan, Election
Abstract

The advent of social media has initiated new opportunities for the promotion of democracy around the globe. Politicians use social media for the dissemination of their political agenda among the masses. Twitter is one of the most popular social media channels used by politicians for political purposes, such as, to interact with the public during election campaigns or routine political activities. In that context, this article examines the Tweets of mainstream leaders (Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Shehbaz Sharif, and Imran Khan) of three foremost political parties in Pakistan (Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and Tahreek Insaf) respectively, who tweeted for election campaigns during General Elections-2018. The study also enfolds the campaign strategies, personal communication and prominent issues tweeted by the above-said leaders. The present study has selected and analyzed 570 Tweets posted by the above mentioned three leaders during the election month of July 2018. The collected tweets were analyzed by applying the Discourse Analysis method. Thus, the identified themes and sub-themes were discussed and interpreted according to the identified themes from the selected Tweets. It was found that the first most widely used strategy was the propagation of political information of campaign rallies. Second, a low-level of personalization was noticed in the tweets. Third, the three leaders highlighted the old and traditional issues of the country. 

References

References

Adam, S., & Maier, M. (2010). Personalization of Politics A Critical Review and Agenda for Research. Annals of the International Communication Association, 34(1), 213-257.

Ahmed, S., & Skoric, M. M. (2014). My name is Khan: the use of Twitter in the campaign for 2013 Pakistan General Election. Paper presented at the 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Bimber, B. (2014). Digital media in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to the personalized political communication environment. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 11(2), 130-150.

Burke, K., Donohue, P., & Siemaszko, C. (2009). US Airways airplane crashes in Hudson River-Hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger III saves all aboard. New York Daily News.

Burke, M., Marlow, C., & Lento, T. (2010). Social network activity and social well-being. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems.

Carlson, N. (2011). The Real History Of Twitter. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-twitter-was-founded-2011-4

Dawn.com. (2016, December 25, 2016). Khawaja Asif reacts to fake news, Israeli defence ministry clarifies position. Dawn. Retrieved from https://www.dawn.com/news/1304400/khawaja-asif-reacts-to-fake-news-israeli-defence-ministry-clarifies-position

ECP. (2018). General Election 2018 - Provisional Result Retrieved from Islamabad: https://www.ecp.gov.pk/frmGenericPage.aspx?PageID=3166

Eijaz, A. (2013). Impact of New Media on Dynamics of Pakistan Politics. Journal of Political Studies.

Elmelund-Præstekær, C., & Svensson, H. M. (2014). Ebbs and flows of negative campaigning: A longitudinal study of the influence of contextual factors on Danish campaign rhetoric. European Journal of Communication, 29(2), 230-239.

Enli, G. (2017). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 50-61.

Golbeck, J., Grimes, J. M., & Rogers, A. (2010). Twitter use by the US Congress. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(8), 1612-1621.

Grant, W. J., Moon, B., & Busby Grant, J. (2010). Digital dialogue? Australian politicians' use of the social network tool Twitter. Australian Journal of Political Science, 45(4), 579-604.

Hendricks, J., & Kaid, L. L. (2014). Techno politics in presidential campaigning: New voices, new technologies, and new voters: Routledge.

Honey, C., & Herring, S. C. (2009). Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. Paper presented at the 2009 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Hong, S., & Nadler, D. (2012). Which candidates do the public discuss online in an election campaign?: The use of social media by 2012 presidential candidates and its impact on candidate salience. Government information quarterly, 29(4), 455-461.

Kagan, V., Stevens, A., & Subrahmanian, V. (2015). Using twitter sentiment to forecast the 2013 pakistani election and the 2014 indian election. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 30(1), 2-5.

Karlsen, R., & Enjolras, B. (2016). Styles of social media campaigning and influence in a hybrid political communication system: Linking candidate survey data with Twitter data. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 21(3), 338-357.

Khan, S. A., & Bhatti, R. (2012). Application of social media in marketing of library and information services: A case study from Pakistan. Webology, 9(1), 1-8.

Liu, C. (2017). Reviewing the Rhetoric of Donald Trump's Twitter of the 2016 Presidential Election. In.

López-Meri, A., Marcos-García, S., & Casero-Ripollés, A. (2017). What do politicians do on Twitter? Functions and communication strategies in the Spanish electoral campaign of 2016. El profesional de la información, 26(5), 795-804.

Parmelee, J. H. (2014). The agenda-building function of political tweets. New Media & Society, 16(3), 434-450.

Radick, S. (2010). How social media is changing the way government does business. Retrieved July 16, 2010. In.

Rahat, G., & Sheafer, T. (2007). The personalization (s) of politics: Israel, 1949–2003. Political Communication, 24(1), 65-80.

Robertson, S. P., Vatrapu, R. K., & Medina, R. (2010). Off the wall political discourse: Facebook use in the 2008 US presidential election. Information Polity, 15(1, 2), 11-31.

Sánchez Murillo, L. F. (2005). El marketing político y sus consecuencias para la democracia. Comunicación y sociedad(4), 11-38.

Shah, B. (2017). Tweeting politicians. Dawn. Retrieved from https://www.dawn.com/news/1307259

Shearer, E., & Gottfried, J. (2017). News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017. Retrieved from US: http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/

Sousa, A., & Ivanova, A. (2012). Constructing Digital Rhetorical Spaces in Twitter: A Case-Study of@ BarackObama. Topics in Linguistics(9).

Statista. (2016). Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2016 (in millions).

Strandberg, K. (2013). A social media revolution or just a case of history repeating itself? The use of social media in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections. New Media & Society, 15(8), 1329-1347.

Túñez, M., & Sixto, J. (2011). Social networks, politics and commitment 2.0: Spanish MPs on Facebook. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 66, 210-246.

Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Critical discourse analysis: History, agenda, theory and methodology. Methods of critical discourse analysis, 2, 1-33.

Zamora-Medina, R., & Zurutuza-Muñoz, C. (2014). Campaigning on Twitter: Towards the “personal style” campaign to activate the political engagement during the 2011 Spanish general elections.

Statistics

Author(s):

University of Sindh

Pakistan

  • rashid.khuhro@usindh.edu.pk

Professor, Department of Media & Communication Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan

Pakistan

  • bashir.memon@usindh.edu.pk

Student, Department of Media & Communication Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan

Pakistan

PhD Student, Department of Media and Communication Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, University of Malaya

Pakistan

Details:

Type: Article
Volume: 1
Issue: 1
Language: English
Id: 6021823f33086
Pages 1 - 22
Published February 10, 2021

Statistics

  • 375
  • 200
  • 118
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.