Twitter and Political Talk Shows in Italy (2012/2013)

From 30th of August 2012 to 30th June 2013 we collected 2,489,669 observations by querying the Twitter Firehose for Tweets containing at last one of the following hashtags: #ballarò or #ballaro, #portaaporta, #agorarai, #ultimaparola, #serviziopubblico, #inmezzora, #infedele or #linfedele, #ottoemezzo, #omnibus, #inonda, #piazzapulita. All the selected hashtags are either official (e.g. advertised on the official Twitter channel of the program or during the TV show) or the most frequently used hashtag related to one of the eleven political talk shows aired by the Italian free-to-air broadcasters during season 2012/2013.

The dataset was acquired via DiscoverText GNIP importer. In other terms, this dataset is a complete collection of all the Tweets related to the political talk shows TV genre during the entire season 2012/2013. From this raw dataset we extracted 1,889,585 observations (76% of the whole dataset) corresponding to Tweets created during the airtime (plus 15 minutes) of each episode (N=1,077) of the shows.