Abstract
This article examines the use of microblogging service Twitter during the period of presidential election 2013, in the Czech Republic and aims to contribute to a development of an emerging research field to which only a marginal interest of academics have been devoted so far, especially in the Czech Republic. A multi-method approach is used to analyze the dataset of tweets, which have contained predefined hashtags within a course of four weeks period – including both, the first and the second round of elections.
The findings indicate that the debate on Twitter "copies" events in mainstream media (mainly presidential TV debate), while linking to information sources in posts does not necessarily lead to the official media sources. The analysis also reveals that tweets most often refer to Karel Schwarzenberg, in comparison with the names of other candidates, and that among the themes of tweets and retweets the most frequent topics are the campaign and political preferences which suggests the potential of Czech Twitter to form a basis of online political communication.