ABSTRACT
Politics, society and social media: a flourishing relationship The growing number of worldwide citizens with access to Internet, along with the striking growth in their use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, paves the way to a new potential revolution. In the new “Big Data world”, citizens surf the Web, create their own account profiles and share information online, providing scholars with precious data concerning several areas of study that can potentially yield consequences in the real world (King 2014). Social media and social network sites (SNS) generate a large amount of data – particularly (but not only) textual data – which contain information on the tastes and the opinions of social media users. Thanks to the recent advances in text analysis, new quantitative approaches can be applied to these rich sources of data (Iacus 2014; King 2014). As a result, it becomes easier (with some caveats, as we discuss later) to profitably analyze the comments available on the Internet to enhance our understanding of public opinion, paying attention to elements that impinge on the formation of a climate of opinion as well as on the consequences of such opinions.
