The data hereby presented refers to the Twitter activity of the candidates to the European Parliament and of the most influential party figures/accounts from the main coalitions of France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.
- Almost 2,000 accounts have been followed from 10/05/2019 to 21/05/2019, for a total of around 2,300,000 tweets.
- All the tweets of the party figures have been analysed here, plus all the retweets and the replies generated by them. The most mentioned accounts and hashtags have been pinpointed as well.
- The Twitter activity has been classified according to whether the Tweet was produced by one of the party Accounts (labelled as “Party Activity” or “Candidates) or by other accounts (“Citizens”).
- A topic emerging from data already at this raw level is that the echo produced by the tweets (expressed in cumulate terms of total retweets and replies by the citizens) appears unrelated to the number of tweets published by the party accounts.
- In particular, the so-called populist parties (the Brexit Party, the Lega – Salvini Premier party, the Rassemblement National party and Vox) looks able to get a massive echo – mainly through retweets- despite a tweet production by the candidates consistent with one of the other parties.