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The Political Landscape of the U.S. Twitterverse

  • Paper
  • Apr 18, 2022
  • #SocialMedia #Politics
Subhayan Mukerjee
@wrahool
(Author)
Yphtach Lelkes
@ylelkes
(Author)
Kokil Jaidka
@KokilJaidka
(Author)
osf.io
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1 Mention
Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan compared to the American citizenry -- a public that is otherwise chara... Show More

Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan compared to the American citizenry -- a public that is otherwise characterized by low levels of political knowledge and disinterest in political affairs. This study seeks to understand this disconnect by conducting an observational analysis of the most popular accounts on American Twitter. We identify opinion leaders by drawing a random sample of ordinary American Twitter users and observing whom they follow. We estimate the ideological leaning and political relevance of these opinion leaders as well as crowd-source how they are perceived by ordinary Americans. We find little evidence that American Twitter is as politicized as is made out to be, with politics and hard news outlets constituting a small subset of these opinion leaders. We find no evidence of polarization among these opinion leaders either. While certain professional categories such as political pundits and political figures are more polarized than others, the overall polarization dissipates further when we factor in the rate at which the opinion leaders tweet: a large number of vocal non-partisan opinion leaders drowns out the partisan voices on the platform. Our results suggest that the degree to which Twitter is political, has likely been overstated in the past. Our findings have implications about how we use Twitter to represent public opinion in the United States.

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Noah Smith @NoahSmith ยท Jun 27, 2022
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This paper is interesting, but looking through it, it seems to me that they use a very narrow definition of "politics" and "political" that basically excludes culture-war stuff. When I saw that they code Elon Musk as having almost 0 "political relevance" I knew something was off.
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