Facebook Impact and Sentiment Analysis on Political Campaigns

The use of social media platforms in political campaigns has widely been studied. Many scholars have provided evidence about the impact of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. So far; some of them have argued on the uselessness of these technologies about changing vote decisions, candidates' perception or political information efficacy. Most recently, the sentiment analysis has provided new paths to understand the link between the social media technology and voters. This paper analyzes data collected from Facebook's posts (4128 posts) and their emoticons - love, hate, anger, likes, etc. - that reveals some kind of sentiment from the users in a local government campaign in the central State of Mexico, which took place in June 2017. Findings show that political parties have a large impact with few posts, but in general, this paper reveals that voters' perception of candidates in Facebook is bad for the winner political party, since despite of this situation, the political party with the best sentiment impact, could not win the elections.