Changes in Referents and Emotions over Time in Election-Related Social Networking Dialog

The U.S. Presidential election in 2008 saw the first serious use of social networking tools by candidates and voters. A week-by-week content analysis of Facebook wall postings by candidates' fans shows that in the months leading up to the election comments became less personal and that positive and negative sentiment was expressed more evenly as the election approached. These trends are taken as support for a Reflection-to-Selection hypothesis and a Converging Sentiment hypothesis of online political discourse.