How Polarized Have We Become? A Multimodal Classification of Trump Followers and Clinton Followers

Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different pictures of America. Inspired by this gaping polarization and the extensive utilization of Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign, in this paper we take the first step in measuring polarization in social media and we attempt to predict individuals' Twitter following behavior through analyzing ones' everyday tweets, profile images and posted pictures. As such, we treat polarization as a classification problem and study to what extent Trump followers and Clinton followers on Twitter can be distinguished, which in turn serves as a metric of polarization in general. We apply LSTM to processing tweet features and we extract visual features using the VGG neural network. Integrating these two sets of features boosts the overall performance. We are able to achieve an accuracy of 69%, suggesting that the high degree of polarization recorded in the literature has started to manifest itself in social media as well.Comment: 16 pages, SocInfo 2017, 9th International Conference on Social Informatic

New Perspectives in Political Communication

This dissertation contains three chapters exploring the nature of political communication and public opinion formation by analyzing social media data. Each chapter uses original sets of Twitter data to examine the public’s response to major shifts in public policy (Chapter Two), the differences between partisan networks (Chapter Three), and how citizens engage with gun policy after mass shootings (Chapter Four). Chapter Two examines how public opinion towards gay marriage changed before and after the legalization of same-sex marriage as a result of the 2016 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision. Exploiting the variation in state law prior to the Court’s decision, I use a difference-in-difference approach to find causal evidence that citizens residing in states where the Supreme Court overturns state laws are more likely to have a negative opinion of the federal decision. In Chapter Three, I collect an original dataset of Twitter conversations about the American political parties to develop a supervised learning algorithm that classifies users as liberal or conservative, using these labels to then map out separate ideological network structures. Analyzing these networks, I find significant differences in how conservative and liberal citizens form online networks, leading to important consequences for information diffusion and action coordination. In Chapter Four, I examine how messages from the political and media elite concerning gun control impact citizen engagement with gun policy issues in the wake of high-profile mass shootings. I analyze the impact of elite messaging with a panel data set of sixty thousand partisan Twitter users, data that includes each user’s full Twitter history as well as information on which accounts they follow. By building this Twitter panel, I am able to better determine which elite messages each user receives and whether the recipient chooses to engage with gun policy. I find that elite messages increase the likelihood a user will engage with gun policy issues, but further determine that we must broaden the notion of elite to include users only considered influential on the Twitter platform.</p

James Monroe’s White House: The Genius of Politics and Place

This research endeavor has discerned the origins of an enduring American nationalistic distinctiveness perpetuated by President James Monroe’s White House. A careful scholarly examination of Monroe’s White House as a cultural landscape enquires into the genesis of interdependence between place and politics. It also studies the depth of the American people’s ability to embrace, as their own, the symbolism and national vision fashioned in these spaces. The juxtaposition of James Monroe’s election as the first United States president after the War of 1812 with the resurrection of the White House manifested for him an exclusive opportunity, still fraught with perils, to define national identities and interiors for the early republic and its posterity. Early attempts to write about the White House compartmentalized the historical context by architecture, social aspects, executive functions, political power, and biographical literature. Self-imposed confinement in historical discourse prohibits a comprehensive narrative while encouraging the autonomy of places, events, ideals, and people. Interpreting the White House as a cultural landscape illuminates the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features within those spaces. Reciprocally, the physical environment retains a central significance as the medium through which human cultures act. Consequently, Monroe’s White House transubstantiated disaffection into a maturing national consciousness. Emphasizing and interpreting primary resources permits the examiner to expose a seemingly mutually exclusive trajectory of James Monroe’s early political career with the White House’s architectural evolution. In contrast, their paths reveal a diminishing parallel. At the point of infinity, the newly elected President Monroe refurbished the interiors and nurtured administrative protocols to foster domestic public and foreign diplomacy while encouraging national respect and integrity for the country

Managing the Paradox of Growth in Brand Communities Through Social Media

The commercial benefits of online brand communities are an important focus for marketers seeking deeper engagement with increasingly elusive consumers. Managing participation in these socially bound brand conversations challenges practitioners to balance authenticity towards the community against corporate goals. This is important as social media proliferation affords communities the capacity to reach a scale well beyond their offline equivalents and to operate independently of brands. While research has identified the important elements of engagement in brand communities, less is known about how strategies required to maximise relationships in these circumstances must change with growth. Using a case study approach, we examine how a rapidly growing firm and its community have managed the challenges of a maturing relationship. We find that, in time, the community becomes self-sustaining, and a new set of marketing management strategies is required to move engagement to the next level

Managing the Paradox of Growth in Brand Communities Through Social Media

The commercial benefits of online brand communities are an important focus for marketers seeking deeper engagement with increasingly elusive consumers. Managing participation in these socially bound brand conversations challenges practitioners to balance authenticity towards the community against corporate goals. This is important as social media proliferation affords communities the capacity to reach a scale well beyond their offline equivalents and to operate independently of brands. While research has identified the important elements of engagement in brand communities, less is known about how strategies required to maximise relationships in these circumstances must change with growth. Using a case study approach, we examine how a rapidly growing firm and its community have managed the challenges of a maturing relationship. We find that, in time, the community becomes self-sustaining, and a new set of marketing management strategies is required to move engagement to the next level