The Battle of El Born. Political narrative and ideological positioning strategies on Twitter

Abstract

Our research takes as a case study the figure of Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, and specifically the controversy over the exhibition “Franco, Victory, Republic. Impunity and Urban Space” held in October 2016 at El Born Center for Culture and Memory. Using a collection of more than 16,000 tweets captured that week, we combined machine learning techniques, network theory and content analysis in order to identify objectives and strategies used by supporters and opponents of Ada Colau in Twitter, studying which narrative is becoming more hegemonic and which users can be considered more influential.

KEYWORDS: political debate, social media, social networks, machine learning, digital methods, Twitter.