#GE16: the 25 most-followed General Election 2016 candidates on Twitter

3 Feb 2016

Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams TD is currently the most followed Irish politician on Twitter, with twice the number of followers of Taoiseach Enda Kenny TD, according to numbers compiled by the Insight Centre for Data Analytics.

Researchers at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics are tracking the Twitter engagement of all candidates in the 2016 General Election.

The researchers’ initial findings reveal that 88pc of declared candidates in General Election 2016, which takes place on Friday 26 February, have a Twitter account.

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams is the most-followed politician on Twitter, with almost 100,000 followers, followed by Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who has less than half that number. In third place is Independent TD Shane Ross.

In recent weeks, Facebook also revealed key numbers ahead of General Election 2016, indicating the kind of following the various political parties have. Fine Gael has a Facebook page with 13,722 likes, while Sinn Féin’s Facebook page has almost 77,000 likes. The Labour Party has more than 12,000 likes on the social network, while Fianna Fáil has more than 11,400.

Over the coming weeks, researchers at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics will watch the engagement of all General Election candidates, tracking growth in their follower numbers and activity on their Twitter pages.

Using sentiment analysis tools developed by Insight, researchers will track key election issues as they emerge on the social-networking platform.

The Insight4Elections project involves a team of researchers across Insight at University College Dublin and Dublin City University.

Professor Derek Greene and Dr Georgiana Ifrim, lead investigators on the project, are hoping that the research will help voters and social media users to get a bird’s eye view of the general election campaign as it unfolds online.

“The Insight Centre represents a major investment by the Irish taxpayer and, through this project, we hope to demonstrate the value that good data research can bring to the democratic process,” said Dr Ifrim.