We created the project Digital Debate aiming to monitor the public opinion about different discussions at a national level through social networks. We seek to analyze the movement on social networks through different tools to learn more about the participants of the discussion, the ways they relate to each other and their statistics. In this case, we analyzed data from Twitter with the Trendsmap application.

In this first publication, our goal was to analyze what people are saying on Twitter about the constituent process and the Constitutional Convention that happened last week (from Tuesday, June 15, to Monday, June 7). Our of 192 hours of data, there were a total of 135 thousand tweets and 108.2 thousand retweets (80%) related to the topic. On average, there were 120 tweets per minute. The peak of tweets per minute happened at the night of June 13 (7:49pm), and the highest frequency of tweets per hour happened on June 10 at 1pm.

This peak of tweets about the convention and the process is related to the formation of the group of 34 constituents “Vocería de los Pueblos” (the People’s Voice), the declaration about the November 15 agreements, and the discussion about six democratic guarantees. Although this declaration was made on June 8, the traditional media covered it on June 9, and it became a debate on the social networks.

The following word cloud shows the frequency in which the words were used in tweets associated to the debate about the constituent process. The “rules”, the word “people” and the references to the “agreement” (probably starting on November 15) received the most mentions in the discussion.

The figure below shows the frequency of hashtags used during the conversations related to the constituent process. It shows that the debate about the regional governor elections in different communication outlets is related to the debate around the constituent process. For the digital community, the political radio and television programs serve as a guide to participate in this debate, even thought they do not directly address issues related to the constituent process.

The Trendsmap application shows which tweets have the most retweets, the most influence (followers), the most replies and the most mentions. Within the data for the week analyzed, several of the tweets in these categories are related to the declaration of the “Vocería de los Pueblos”.

In addition, we were able to learn about the interactions between the accounts that participated in the conversation. Two important communities of participants could be clearly seen on Twitter, aligned with figures such as José Antonio Kast, at one end, and the accounts of Piensaprensa and Mister_wolf_0, at the other. The latter had the most retweets during the week, with content associated with the constituent process, followed by Felipe Bianchi and Franco Basso.

Communities map:

Methodological Note

This report was prepared based on the query of Twitter interactions through the Trendsmap application, which provides detailed information about any conversation on Twitter using search terms and filtering through various options.

For this case study, terms were used to search for conversations of users in the social network about the constituent process in Chile. To that end, we used words and hashtags associated with the topic. The query was as follows: Constituyent* OR Constitucional* OR Constitucio* OR Convencion* OR #ConvencionConstitu* OR #procesoconstitu* OR #nuevaconstituci* OR #Constituc*

We followed the steps bellow to construct the community map: First, we downloaded a database with interactions in the form of directed networks with weightings associated with each node from the Trendsmap platform. Then, the database was converted to the dataframe format and the column headings were modified with appropriate tags to make the file compatible with the software Gephi. Afterwards, the database was loaded into the software, where we applied clustering techniques using the modularity indicator. Lastly, was used the viewing algorithm Force Atlas 2 to plot.

* The Digital Democracy Room is a project of FGV DAPP in Brazil in partnership with Chequeado, Espacio Público, Linterna Verde and Ojo Público. It’s goal is to monitor and analyze the digital conversations regarding the electoral context.

The analysis is available the website of Espacio Público here.