Exploring Twitter discourse with BERTopic: topic modeling of tweets related to the major German parties during the 2021 German federal election

Abstract

AbstractWe present a study in the context of computational social science that explores the topics debated in the context of the 2021 German Federal Election by using the topic modeling technique BERTopic. The corpus consists of German language tweets posted by political party accounts of the major German parties, as well as tweets by the general public mentioning the party accounts. We examined the textual content of the tweets but also included the text in images that were posted into the analysis by extracting the text using optical character recognition (OCR). Our results show that the most frequently discussed topics are party-oriented policies (including call-to-action content), climate policy and financial policy, with these topics being discussed in tweets by both, the political party accounts and tweets by accounts mentioning them. In addition, we observed that some topics were discussed consistently throughout the year, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate policy or digitization, while other topics, such as the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan or Israel were debated to a greater extent at limited time frames during the election year.