Emergent use of Social Media on Elections: the use of Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for Political Purposes

Abstract

People spend more time on social media either for personal or social interest which generates an expanding amount of Data. This paper is written for researchers seeking to have an overview of the different technical methods used for political purposes principally Data Mining and Social Network Analysis. Hence, the first part introduces the impact of Social Media on politics for different aims such as communicating with voters, promoting participation, and predicting election results, then the two main methods to achieve political purposes were presented. Data mining approaches is likely to be used on political context to classify citizen’s opinion or predicting results thus by using methods such as term occurrence, mentions, Support Vector Machine, Machine Learning, and Artificial Neural Networks. The Social Network Analysis approaches are used to retrieve data about influencers, their role during a period, and the nature of the information shared.