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Exploring Political Discourse in Ecuador's 2025 Election: Social Media Topic Modeling with BERTopic

  • Adriana Mishell Pazmiño-Villamarín
  • , Marco López-Paredes
  • , Jorge Cruz-Silva
  • , Jorge Galán-Mena
  • , Daniel Pulla-Sánchez
  • , Martín López-Nores

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Abstract

    This study traces how Ecuadorian news outlets framed the 2025 general elections on social platforms. We analysed 8174 posts from 48 media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X (1 Jan-29 Jun 2025). Spanish texts were cleaned, embedded with a RoBERTa model, reduced via UMAP and clustered with BERTopic-HDBSCAN. Thirty-one topics emerged (mean coherence C-v=0.50; diversity =0.84); five hold 47.5% of the corpus and centre on Daniel Noboa and territorial voting patterns. Posting spikes on 9 Feb, 23 Mar and 13 Apr coincide with the first round, the presidential debate and the runoff, confirming an event-driven agenda. A document map shows dense central clusters for high-volume themes and scattered points for marginal narratives. Content production remains concentrated: three outlets generate nearly one-third of posts and Facebook carries over half the traffic, suggesting that social-platform affordances have not displaced traditional logics of centralisation and candidate-centric framing in Ecuadorian electoral journalism.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationETCM 2025 - 9th Ecuador Technical Chapters Meeting
    PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
    ISBN (Electronic)9798331552640
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2025
    Event9th Ecuador Technical Chapters Meeting, ETCM 2025 - Quito, Ecuador
    Duration: Oct 21 2025Oct 24 2025

    Publication series

    NameETCM 2025 - 9th Ecuador Technical Chapters Meeting

    Conference

    Conference9th Ecuador Technical Chapters Meeting, ETCM 2025
    Country/TerritoryEcuador
    CityQuito
    Period10/21/2510/24/25

    Keywords

    • BERTopic
    • Ecuador 2025 elections
    • electoral communication
    • HDBSCAN
    • political communication
    • political topic modeling
    • social-media mining
    • UMAP
    • unsupervised NLP

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