Phil Howard INFORMATION · TECHNOLOGY · SOCIETY

News and Political Information Consumption in Mexico: Mapping the 2018 Mexican Presidential Election on Twitter and Facebook

In Mexico, there are rising concerns over computational propaganda and the political polarization it may cause. In this data memo, we analyze data about political news and information shared over Twitter and Facebook in the period leading up to the 2018 Mexican presidential election. We find that: (1) the leading candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador dominates the Twitter conversation, with almost four times as much daily content about him than any of the other candidates and at least four times the volume of high frequency tweeting; (2) the majority of political news shared over Twitter and Facebook comes from professional news sources, with established news brands shared most widely; (3) less than one percent of political news and information shared on Facebook comes from official candidate and party pages.

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Democracy
Technology and Society
Public Policy
Research Methods
International Affairs