Twitter as the digital amphitheather : An analysis on Swedish Twitter users in #Migpol during the day before the Swedish election 2018

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to analyze Swedish Twitter users participation in Swedish migration politics in an online setting by examining the interactions and discussions between users on the platform the day before the Swedish election of 2018. The potential insight into political views that social media presents gave us an opportunity to explore how Swedish citizens, politicians, or members of other social and professional roles involved themselves politically and how they interacted with others on Twitter. We did this by examining the hashtag “#Migpol” (short for “Migration politics”). We collected and analyzed a total amount of 328 tweets and an additional 400 replies to these tweets where users had included the hashtag. This was done in order to construct our network which consisted of the platform functions @mention and @reply. It was through these we analyzed users interactions with other users and organizations. To perform our study, we chose a mixed method approach of network analysis and a secondary method inspired by discourse analysis. For our analysis, we applied a theoretical framework consisting of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory and Alessandro Pizzorno’s ideas on political participation. Pizzorno’s ideas from 1970 were reworked and adapted in order to fit for research on social media. The result of the network analysis was displayed as a visualization that revealed how multiple users obtained various values of centrality due to the interaction rate between users, it also revealed that the total number of mutual relationships in the network was low and instead there was a prevalence of clusters of smaller networks inside the much larger network. The tweets containing the hashtags were then analyzed with the method inspired by discourse analysis as we wanted a deeper insight into how the users expressed their opinions. This was also done in order to find dominant topics and whether or not the discourse was affected by the actor’s centrality value. The result of this showed that an anti-immigration party and the party leader public debate on the 7th of September held a great focus while there was a third subject emerging which showed signs of nationalism. The discourse was not affected by centrality value but an indication that some actors were more known inside the hashtag than others.