Presence and interaction on Twitter of the main candidates for the governorship of Nuevo Leon, 2021

The use of Twitter to influence the opinion of citizens has become a common practice among politicians during electoral campaigns in Mexico. This study analyzes the influence of the official debate organized by the Electoral Institute of the State of Nuevo Leon in the presence and interaction on Twitter of the main candidates for the governor-ship of Nuevo Leon in 2021. It includes a quantitative analysis of 205,537 tweets with the hashtags of campaign slogan and name of the four candidates and 217,164 interactions recorded in 1,247 tweets posted from the official accounts of the candidates. The results show that election debates may not have a significant impact on the candidates’ presence on Twitter and that the political show or politainment in traditional mass media and social networks before, during and after a debate have greater effect. The candidates’ tweets that generate the most interactions with their followers are those that directly involve more than one political opponent, suggesting that these constitute a planned strategy, as re-quired by politics and the electoral process for social networks.