Sharing Media and Electoral Preference on Twitter: Analysis of Public Opinion during the 2014 Elections in Brazil

This research analyzed a series of tweets published during the second round of the 2014 presidential elections in Brazil, in order to investigate the shared media and the electoral preference of citizens on Twitter. To that end, we developed a methodology and applied a manual analysis of content and sentiment to a sample of 1129 tweets (N = 1129) published at the time in order to identify which media were shared in each of the publications and the electoral preference between the two candidates expressed in the tweet. Our findings reinforce the idea that mainstream media is predominantly share don social media, but also that there is considerable presence (40%) of what we call "complementary media,"which offer more partybased content during the campaign. Furthermore, both "audiences" in the analysis shared the same proportion of mainstream and complementary media, which denotes a pattern to be tested in future studies.