Vienna, 4 February 2020: With the lead of wahlbeobachtung.org and in cooperation with Democracy Reporting International (DRI) and MEMO98, an international team was put together to analyze the election campaign on social media channels during the early parliamentary elections 2019 in Austria.
The implementation in Austria was carried out in close cooperation with the Vienna Data Science Group Data4Good and the Center for Applied Social Research of the Faculty for Public Policy Analysis of the University Fundação Getulio Vargas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil (FGV DAPP).
Wahlbeobachtung.org applied for both, Facebook and Twitter, an API access to gain access to posts and interactions on social media from politicians, parties, opinion leaders, the media and journalists. Vienna Data Science Group Data4Good took the lead in developing a comprehensive program for the analysis and graphical representation of the data (see here to access the interactive graphs of results). A total of 26,000 postings by politicians / parties and 1.1 million generic user comments were analyzed between 8 September and 4 October.
YouTube videos were selected using the same keywords as used for the analysis of Facebook and Twitter to gather information about political content. The FDV DAPP team selected the 25 most-watched videos on YouTube every week that were used by politicians and political parties for the election campaign.
The goal of this joint project of Democracy Reporting International, MEMO98 and wahlbeobachtung.org was to test new methods of monitoring the election campaign on social media channels. The results of this research project have now been summarized and published in this final report which also includes a set of recommendations.
Election Assessment Mission Report with good practice examples published
Webinar on European elections’ good practices and lessons learned
Vote Advice Application for the Austrian general elections online
IFES Symposium on AI & Disinformation