Analyzing the usage of social media during spanish presidential electoral campaigns

The large amount of user generated data that Online Social Networks produce has remarkably drawn the attention for researchers on human behavior in the recent years. In this work, we use temporal series and complex network analysis to unveil the users' behavioral patterns during the Spanish presidential electoral campaigns in Twitter. We introduce a new measure to study political sentiment in Twitter, which we call the relative support. We have also characterized user behavior by analyzing the structural and dynamical patterns of the complex networks emergent from the mention and retweet networks. Our results suggest that the collective attention is driven by a very small fraction of users. Furthermore, we have analyzed the interactions taking place among politicians, observing a lack of debate. Moreover, we characterize the users and politicians' interactions and propose a model to simulate their behavior.