Twitter depoliticized? An exploration of trending topics in Mexico

Abstract

In just ten years of existence, Twitter has played an important role as a channel of communication for relevant political and social movements in several countries, including Mexico. In a large extent, this force is related to the constant presence on the main page of the trending topics (TT) or major trends list. However, in recent months this network seems to be loosing political force, which seems to be related to the trivialization of contents of the list of trending topics. To prove this assumption, we carried on a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of hashtags (#) or labels of messages included in the top ten items of trending topics in the months of September 2014 and September 2015 in Mexico. The results showed an increasingly dominant place of everyday worries, as well as transnational economic interests, thanks to which Twitter has increased its presence as a global spokesman for show business and sports figures, or advertisment for new technologies, at the expense of political mobilization potential.