Social metamedia and public service: The debate in Twitter for television programs on the BBC, RTVE, and CCMA

Public television has a mission to promote debate around topics of public interest. Twitter is the social metamedia used by TV programs to fulfil this task online. This research analyzes the capability of public television to generate an effective debate through Twitter and also looks at the relationship between physical audience and social audience. We apply a quantitative methodology that employs our own capture and treatment technique to examine the activity generated by the hashtags proposed by six television programs on BBC One, TV3, and La 1. The main finding shows that these programs fail in their mission to generate a robust public debate in Twitter; instead the discussion is generated by a recurrent group of users that control the debate flow around their comments. Finally, the physical audience is not a predictive factor of the social audience.