Citizenship or political? The Twitter accounts that the Media and their Directors started to follow

Abstract

Digital platforms have transformed the influence streams among media, journalists, politicians and the citizenship, as well as concerning gatekeeping and agenda setting  (Guo and Vargo, 2017; Wallace, 2018; Casero-Ripollés, 2021). Nonetheless, homophilic tendencies among power groups continue to be reproduced online (McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook, 2001; Maares, Lind and Greussing, 2021). With the objective of contributing to the deepening of the understanding of the dynamics and influence flows online among power elites, we analyzed via a machine learning Software, the 50 accounts that the network of the most followed Media Directors in Spain began following and compared them with the accounts that the Media they manage started following. We categorized them in Types of accounts, Location and Gender, and analyzed the repetitions between the accounts they began to follow to subsequently work with data visualization methods in order to find trends and tendencies (Bail, 2014; Batrinca and Treleaven, 2015). The results of this research indicate that some patterns of behavior differ between both networks, such as the gender and types of accounts they began following, whereas the location presented similar trends. The year where we can see the highest similarities corresponds to 2018, an electoral year in Spain, where both networks started following a majority of Spanish male politicians.