Social vs news media in politics: Revisiting the case of the 2015 Greek bailout referendum

Abstract

The power of social media, and especially Twitter, in public opinion formation for political matters has been extensively studied. In several cases, such as the US presidential elections in 2016, the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the Greek Bailout referendum in 2015, public opinion was expressed in the ballots in a similar way as in Twitter and in contrast to news media agenda. In the recent parliamentary elections in Greece (May 2023), however, things were reversed. The result of that election was a real shock for the Twitter users and much closer to the views (and support) of news media. In this paper, we revisit the case of Greek referendum in 2015 and we compare the topics discussed in the news media with those discussed in the Twitter in order to identify whether the deviation between Twitter users and news media was based on the dominance of the news agenda setting mechanism or to other reasons, such as the nature of Twitter which is to put forward alternative voices.