Who follows Turkish Presidential candidates in 2023 elections? [Türkiye 2023 Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimlerinde adayları kim takip ediyor?]

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SIU59756.2023.10223884

Social media serves as an important platform for political discussions, especially during election periods. While politicians use the platform to reach out to voters and share their campaigns, it also creates a debate environment for different voter groups. It is possible to see supportive and critical speeches simultaneously. Particularly as the election date approaches, undecided voters follow politicians on online platforms to learn about their campaigns. Changes in politicians' followers can be observed in detail by analyzing women and young voters who may be decisive in the results. In this study, we analyzed candidates for the 2023 Presidential elections of Türkiye and their followers on the Twitter platform. We examined how the demographic of these followers change over time. Prior to analyzing demographics such as gender and age group, we identified bot accounts and isolated them from the dataset. Significant events are reflected in the number of followers and the relationship between the observed anomalies and changes in the demographics have also been studied in this work.