SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Participation
From Tweets to Power: An Integrative Thematic Review of Political Communication and Platform Governance on Twitter/X (2009–2024)
Provisionally accepted
- Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This integrative thematic review synthesizes peer-reviewed studies on political communication via Twitter/X indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus from 2009–2024 (final corpus: 52 articles). Searches, de-duplication, and screening followed a PRISMA-style workflow; included studies were coded using a hybrid deductive–inductive thematic analysis. Findings cluster around five axes: actor strategy (personalization, timing, and campaign orchestration), audience behavior (engagement patterns and selective exposure), platform architecture (affordances and algorithmic mediation), trust and legitimacy (institutional credibility vs. visibility logics), and methodological innovation (computational scaling vs. interpretive depth). The field shows conceptual consolidation but structural imbalance: dominance of US/EU scholarship, limited cross-regional integration, and uneven theoretical convergence. The study argues for mixed-method designs that integrate discourse, network, and behavioral data; greater attention to non-Western contexts; and explicit treatment of platforms as political actors as well as communication stages. Limitations include restriction to two databases and the 2009–2024 window, absence of formal quality appraisal, and evolving platform/API conditions that affect reproducibility. The review offers a roadmap for building cumulative, comparative, and theory-driven research on Twitter/X and governance.
Keywords: Twitter/X, political communication, Platform governance, Digital diplomacy, Public trust, polarization, platform affordances, Methodological innovation
Received: 15 Jul 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Naranjo, Casillas-Martín, Cabezas-González and Nevado-Batalla Moreno. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Andrés Naranjo, anaranjo.vinueza@gmail.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.