El Hashtag, Recurso de Twitter para Construir Realidades Políticas e Inducir en la Intención del Votante, Antes y Durante la Consulta Popular y Referéndum 2018 en Ecuador

Abstract

The use of social networks has generated a significant advance in political campaign strategies because the use of new tools and digital platforms by candidates and their campaign teams, to present their proposals and plans trying to convince voters and obtain their support by vote. This research aims to analyze the use of retuit and hashtag on the Twitter microblogging platform and determine if its influx generates changes in the electoral preferences of Internet users and the degree of interaction they generated and determine the percentage of engagement they achieved during the Popular Consultation and Referendum campaign 2018, from the official start of the political promotion period on February 3, until the day of the vote, on March 4, 2018. The research is quantitative, experimentally designed, descriptive type and deductive logic. The sample is a compilation of retweets and hashtags generated by 28 political protagonists, whose support tendencies are divided between YES and NO. The results were obtained from the interaction of 40 tweets and 32 hashtags generated by characters and political parties, the most relevant in terms of number and engagement in the period of time already mentioned. From the analysis of the results, it is highlighted that the official count of the vote obtained for questions two, three and six, which were the primary objective of the NO campaign, show a percentage increase that, without reaching the majority, breaks the uniformity of the percentages obtained in favor of YES in the other four questions. The Hashtag is important to channel the contents and plan them in immediate terms, however, even their implementation corresponds to a complementary process within a system called campaign plan, because it still does not manage to be the only decisive factor of influence to achieve promotion or change of an electoral decision, or increase the number of votes among an electorate.