Comparing the coverage of the “marriage for all” vote on Twitter and in the newspapers

This paper investigates the differences in the Twitter and newspapers coverage of the “marriage for all” popular vote that took place in Switzerland in 2021. More precisely, we ask the following questions: How salient were discussions about the marriage for all on Twitter and in the newspapers? What major arguments were mobilized in both media? How were these arguments received (i.e. retweets, likes, replies)? We extracted publicly available tweets from users involved in the debate and news articles containing specific keywords. These text data have been automatically analyzed to find major views and topics of discussions using keyword and collocation analyses, as well as topic modelling. Results show that criticism of marriage for all is clearly in the minority, but there is strong polarization over whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt or have children through sperm donation.