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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Graph 6: Qualitative results obtained for Opposition Leader Mr. Mariano Rajoy Brey
between 3 rd March, 2011, and 3 rd April, 2011.
The only remarkable exception starts on the 29 th of March and continues until the 3 rd of
April, a period in which Mr. Rajoy obtains more negative than positive results. This is
basically due to the debate around his aptitudes as leader of the opposition party and
was a consequence of the comment that the Ex-President Aznar made about his
personality and his Galician origins.
Conclusions
This paper, as we have previously mentioned, intends to be part of the mapping
process of public opinion behaviour on the Internet. Even though our previous
experiences had shown that the agenda-setting process for social media could be
different from the agenda-setting power of the traditional MSM, this research shows
that such difference does not yet apply to political issues.
The small divergences that we have found tend to be related to topics that are not
strictly linked to political agenda, and are more related to anecdotes or opinions about
the suitability of the attitudes and behaviours of Spanish politicians. Thus, we can say
that, even if political agenda may not be affected, public image of politicians is a
popular issue in the conversations that take place in the Spanish micro-media.
There are various challenges for the future. First of all, there is a strict need to develop
efficient software and research models that allow us to systematically collect and
classify data in a reliable way. Our model, for example, is in process of change, and we
are in search of new intelligent semantic systems that will help us to study the
qualitative data linked to each category (actors and media). This kind information is
vital to study the evolution of public image on the social media.
Another important challenge related to the previous one is the access to social and
online media profiles. Nostracker tracks around 5,000 public Twitter profiles, but there
are many others that are not accessible yet, for example. Our work is to carefully
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