Abstract

VALLEJO, Ana Maria Fernandez. Communicating emotions in the metapolitical discourse of twitter: the case of #MADURO versus @NICOLASMADURO. OBS* [online]. 2018, vol.12, n.3, pp.175-194. ISSN 1646-5954.

Social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, are providing an essential space for the development of political debate. In this study, we investigate how the emotions are communicated in this public sphere, paying special attention to emotions, stimulus, purpose and style. We analyse a corpus of 1353 tweets, which contain #Maduro (Subcorpus1) or @NicolasMaduro (Subcorpus2). These tweets were published on July 24, 2017, a date between July 16 -when the opposition to Maduro convened a referendum- and, on July 30 -the day of the official vote for the Constituent Assembly. Through the direct reading of tweets and using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we demonstrate that the emotions are an essential part of this network and, among them, the most frequent are anger and fear. Additionally, the analysis has revealed that this corpus exhibits a high polarization between the supporters and the opponents of Maduro, yet Maduro’s opponents’ tweets prevail. In order to understand the function of these tweets, our findings show that citizens use Twitter as a persuasive campaign tool to criticize Maduro or, alternatively, to support him. Finally, regarding expression, the formal analysis conducted notes how the negative expression (emotional, trolling, insults) prevails.

Keywords : Emotions; Social Media; Public Opinion; Venezuela.

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