The Use of Online Videos in the 2008 U.S. Congressional Elections

With 39% of Americans admitting the use of the Web to get unfiltered campaign materials, it becomes important to evaluate how they are searching for these materials and what they are finding. Assuming that the search will take place on one of the major search engines, such as Google, the results need to be scrutinized to ensure that standards of fairness and balanced coverage are upheld. In this paper, we offer an exploratory analysis of political online video data collected in the framework of a broader project aimed at capturing efforts of spamming search engine results for political motives. By exploiting online video features such as the added date, number of views, and ranking position, as well as content related features such as description keywords, political inclination of the submitter, the political message, and comments associated with a video, we depict a picture of how the online video medium was used during the last congressional political campaign. Our analysis takes int...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Eni Mustafaraj, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Catherine Grevet
• Keywords: CSE 2009, Online Video, Search Engine, Theoretical Computer Science, Video