The Vancouver Sun analyzed more 5,500 tweets from the official Twitter accounts of party leaders since the start of the election campaign, scoring each tweet as positive or negative based on word choice.
Two periods stood out as the most negative for all candidates: the period following the discovery of Trudeau鈥檚 brown face photos, which saw increased negativity from all accounts, and in the days ahead of the two all-leaders debates, when accounts were used to attack other party leaders and their policies.
Overall, though, most tweets were classified as slightly positive or neutral 鈥� likely because the focus of the leader鈥檚 accounts was often on promoting campaign events or policy announcements rather than engaging with the public.
鈥淚t鈥檚 rare that we see party leaders authentically engage with voters,鈥� said Anatoliy Gruzd, director of research at Ryerson University鈥檚 .
鈥淭hey鈥檙e busy on the campaign trail and they have a whole social media team managing the account so sometimes its hard to come off as authentic.鈥�
At the same time Twitter is becoming a risky place for politicians, Gruzd said, because trolls and hate messages tend to surge following posts. But using Twitter to broadcast policy announcement and campaign updates in real time makes Twitter particularly appealing to politicians, he said.
鈥淣ow they don鈥檛 need to wait until the next morning to set up a press conference.鈥�
Methodology
Tweets from the official accounts of party leaders were analyzed starting on the day the election was called. Each tweet was scored using an Afinn model for sentiment analysis, which calculates a positive or negative value for each word in the tweet. Daily scores were calculated by taking the average from each day鈥檚 tweets, excluding retweets and French language tweets. Yves-Francois Blanchet published very few tweets in English and was dropped from the analysis.
