Bringing Up Old Party Scandals on Twitter during Spanish Election Campaigns

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

In particular, different terms and hashtags may be used to frame past political scandals strategically during election campaigns; the present project examined the utilisation of three recent corruption scandals, affecting three different political parties, by their opponents, and explored how the parties affected responded to this.

Such attention was very differently distributed, with more than 6,000 of the total 8,700 tweets (72%) focussing on one of the three scandals. The third scandal, by comparison, was brought up in fewer than 800 tweets. These scandals were framed by a number of different hashtags – sometimes merely descriptive, sometimes linking them to the parties or expressing voting recommendations.

Several key influencers also emerged in these discussions: these included politicians, journalists, lawyers, and party activists, who pursued various offensive or defensive strategies. In one case, there was also a curious set of highly repetitive interactions between accounts supporting far-left and far-right populist parties.