Electoral conversation in monitored democracies: a typology for analysis of comments in online social networks

Abstract

The article discusses how the communicative abundance enhanced by online spaces affects the organization of contemporary conversations in monitory democracies. It is discussed how social monitors generate specific communication flows to institutions and political actors in online social networks. The behavior of the online conversation about the Brazilian elections in 2014 is analyzed from 610 thousand comments at Folha de S. Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo fan pages on Facebook. The research question is: do the commentators in the three newspapers’ fan pages have similar behaviors? Also, it is proposed a typology to classify the comments. Among the results obtained, the volume of noise in the digital electoral debate is higher than the thematic comments.

Keywords

• Democracia Monitorada
• Conversação Digital
• Eleições 2014
• Ruído
• Monitores