UMUSE - User Monitoring of the US Presidential Election.

This paper presents the results of a new monitoring project of the US presidential election with the aim of establishing computer-based tools to track the popularity of the two main candidates. The innovative methods that have designed and developed allow us to extract the frequency of search queries sent to numerous search engines, social media, and e-shops. Based on these data, this paper demonstrates that Donald Trump is significantly more frequently searched than Joe Biden. When analyzing various political topics, it is observed that the US Internet users have shown a remarkable interest in subjects like Coronavirus, and Jobs in 2020. Other subjects such as Education or Healthcare were given less attention. Finally, some “flame” topics such as Black lives matter appeared to be very popular for a few days before returning to a low level of interest.