What does Twitter have to say about ideology?

Political debates bearing ideological references exist for long in our society; the last few years though the explosion of the use of the internet and the social media as communication means have boosted the production of ideological texts to unprecedented levels. This creates the need for automated processing of the text if we are interested in understanding the ideological references it contains. In this work, we propose a set of linguistic rules based on certain criteria that identify a text as bearing ideology. We codify and implement these rules as part of a Natural Language Processing System that we also present. We evaluate the system by using it to identify if ideology exists in tweets published by French politicians and discuss its performance.