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

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.