Twitter as a Space for Political Discussion: The Case of Poland and the European Parliament Election in 2019

This paper examines the role of Twitter as a space for public discussion in Poland during the European Parliament election in 2019. I explicitly assume that some accounts belong to ‘authentic’ citizens, while the other accounts are bots, cyborgs or trolls. In consequence, visible Twitter accounts activity is an outcome of various motives of regular citizens, opinion leaders, creators of bots, ‘employers’ of paid trolls, and others. By examining actions performed by Twitter accounts, it is possible to recognize different types of accounts and estimate to what proportion Twitter is a space for authentic political discussion. My aim is to check how much attention an average Twitter account pays to politics, and to the election especially. The research questions are: 1) how do Twitter accounts react to political topics (e.g. participating in discussions, retweeting), 2) under what conditions are they likely to react to political topics (e.g. how politically homogenous are accounts their follow, how many news media accounts they follow); 3) are there behavioural patterns that can be assigned to authentic (performed by unorganised citizens) or organised (bots, troll farms) activity? The analyses will be conducted on a sample of 100,000 Twitter accounts who are recognized as using Polish language. I focus on the behaviour of non-institutional actors, therefore, I excluded from the dataset all accounts of organisations (political parties, companies, NGOs, media, think-tanks), and active politicians. The data will be collected systematically by means of the Twitter Rest API from the 1st February to the 30th June 2019.