A Taxonomy for Classifying User Group Activity in Online Political Discourse

Twitter has become a popular platform for political conversation. Within the TwitterSphere, multiple users contribute to the discourse through different modalities and with varying degrees of engagement. In this paper, we seek to profile the different groups of users present in online political discourse. We provide a taxonomy that can be used to classify the various users, determine each group's representation and their respective share of the online conversation. Along with core information foraging concepts, the taxonomy aims to reduce the foraging costs associated with exploratory searching. This work provides a practical approach for analyzing and pre-processing social media data and offers valuable recommendation for future expansion into sentiment analysis.