Political Activism in the Twittersphere during the 2012 French Presidential Campaign

The 2012 French presidential election was characterized by an unprecedented interest for social networks, particularly for Twitter. This new form of public participation reveals an enlargement of contribution modalities to the public and also reflects a new dynamic of the presidential campaign, combining online and offline interventions. Our communication addresses the analysis of the 2012 presidential starting from the activity deployed on Twitter at the earliest entrance in the campaign of the most important candidates up to the end of the second round. Our approach is empirical and leans on a systematic archiving process of Twitter stream that has been started upstream the official campaign. Our methods are issued from the social network analysis and from the web mining. In this paper, we focus more specifically on the activity of two types of networked activist groups: the first, which could be qualified as institutional, is initiated by the candidates and their political apparatus; the second, is the result of individual aggregation on the basis of shared opinions. We suggest starting from the description of their activities on the net, to reveal their relationships network and to analyse the interactions of these groups within their environment on Twitter linked with the principal events of the campaign. Our study shows that we are witnessing both an enlargement of participating audience to a political discussion and a renewing of contents, discourse registers and public discussion modalities. As a result, these affinity groups, far from being formed spontaneously, are not disconnected from party structures which they remain linked by individuals whose role in animation and discussing is essential. In this sense, it appears that these groups extend and renew the forms of the political debate in the public sphere while also disconnecting them formally from the supporters' apparatuses.