What do discussions on social media platforms tell us about political behaviour? Pablo Barberá and Gonzalo Rivero outline results from a study of 12,000 Spanish Twitter users during the 2011 Spanish general election and 50,000 American Twitter users during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. They find that users who were on the extreme left or right of an ideological scale played a disproportionately large part in political discussions during the election campaigns. They suggest that caution should therefore be exercised in using Twitter as a reliable source for gauging public opinion

Barberá, Pablo

Rivero, Gonzalo

LSE Research Online

09/12/2014Political discussions on Twitter during elections aredominated by those with extreme viewsblogs.lse.ac.uk /europpblog/2014/12/09/political-discussions-on-twitter-during-elections-are-dominated-by-those-with-extreme-views/What do discussions on social media platforms tell us about political behaviour? Pablo Barberá andGonzalo Rivero outline results from a study of 12,000 Spanish Twitter users during the 2011Spanish general election and 50,000 American Twitter users during the 2012 U.S. presidentialelection. They find that users who were on the extreme left or right of an ideological scale played adisproportionately large part in political discussions during the election campaigns. They suggestthat caution should therefore be exercised in using Twitter as a reliable source for gauging publicopinion.The increasing use of social media platforms has generated great expectations regarding theirpotential to transform political communication and the interactions between political elites andcitizens. However, the way in which tools such as Facebook or Twitter affect different modes ofpolitical participation remains an open academic debate. Over the past few years, scholars haveexamined how social media affect the emergence of mass protests and revolutions, to what extentthey allow minority voices to be heard , how they increase citizens’ access to a greater diversity ofpolitical views, or even whether it is possible to use social media data to predict political eventssuch as elections or demonstrations.A common element to most of these analyses is the claim that social media democratises access to publiccommunication. Since they homogeneously reduce the cost of broadcasting messages to a large number ofindividuals, independently of who the sender is, it is often argued that social media should contribute to the quality ofpolitical representation. However, as we demonstrate in a new study that uses Twitter data, this is not the case.Quite the opposite: political actors with a larger presence in offline public debates remain central on social mediawebsites, which intensifies biases in political participation. This finding also calls into question the potential of socialmedia data to become a reliable source of information about public opinion.Social media and political representationThis core finding is intuitive, and illustrates the difficulties associated with the use this type of data. Analysing Twitteris not very different from walking into a noisy bar. We can hear voices, but we have very little information about thesubjects. We can hear people speak and we can observe who is listening and to whom, but we cannot pose anyquestions. We are surrounded by data, but as in most cases when it comes to analysing politics and the Internet,we are still learning how to exploit the information to which we now have access. By studying online interactions,however, we can contribute to the development of tools that allow us to understand how Twitter works as a first stepprior to developing theories and narratives about the relationship between social media and politics.Our research is part of a larger research project, tuitometro.es, which we launched in 2011 and which aims tomeasure public sentiment about relevant political events in real time using Twitter data. We use a dataset thatincludes all tweets mentioning one of the two major candidates competing in the 2011 Spanish general election andthe 2012 U.S. presidential election over a 70-day period prior to each election. These datasets are complementedwith an in-depth analysis of a random sample of 12,000 (Spain) and 50,000 (U.S.) Twitter users who participatedactively in Twitter conversations during our period of analysis, for which we estimated relevant socio-demographicand political variables.Analysing this data yields four main conclusions. First, we find that most users who write about politics on Twitter1/3are male. Second, even if the geographic distribution of Twitter users in each country resembles that of the generalpopulation, there is a clear bias in favour of urban areas. Third, political discussion among active Twitter usersappears to be highly polarised: users with clear ideological leanings are much more active and generate a majorityof the content. Finally, we find significant differences in the patterns of discussion over our period of analysis: in bothcountries, campaign events increase or diminish inequality in participation on Twitter, leading to changes in theextent to which political discussion is dominated by a small number of users who are very active.Perhaps our most interesting result is the one concerning the relationship between ideology and participation onTwitter, which we illustrate with the figure below. Regarding the distribution of users according to their ideologicalidentification, they are divided in almost identical proportion between right and left, conservative and liberal in bothcountries. Second, we find that the activity of users whose ideological positions are distant from the ideologicalcentre is higher with respect to the number of tweets, retweets, and “@ replies” they publish. In other words, thisresult suggests that the political discussion on Twitter is mainly driven by citizens with extreme values on theideological scale.Figure: Twitter use during the 2011 Spanish general election and 2012 U.S. presidential electionNote: Each dot represents a set number of Twitter users, the location on the horizontal axisindicates their ideology, while the height on the vertical axis indicates how many tweets weresent by users. The line shows the general trend, indicating that in both Spain and the UnitedStates, a higher proportion of tweets were sent by those users on the extreme left and rightof the ideological scale. See the authors’ longer paper for full calculations.When we divide the sample between right-wing and left-wing users (or conservatives and liberals), we also findother relevant asymmetries. For instance, although in the Spanish case the total number of tweets sent by eachgroup is roughly similar, conservative users retweet at a considerably higher rate than liberal ones. This behavioursuggests that the political discussion among right-wing voters is more hierarchical and structured. In the U.S. wealso find significant differences between ideological groups, but at a deeper level. The users we classify asconservatives tend to be more active in general, with a higher number of tweets coming from this side of theideological spectrum.The implications of our study depend on the use that researchers intend to give to Twitter data. From an appliedperspective, if we are interested in it as a source of information for political and social analysis, our results raiseconcerns about its potential, given the biases we have discovered. Any analysis based on the volume of tweets ortheir “sentiment” will inherently be unreliable if it does not account for the factors indicated above. In this sense, our2/3criticism is constructive, since we are quantifying the variables that will require the most attention in future statisticalanalyses of Twitter data. From a more general standpoint, our results underscore the idea that Twitter, just like anyother communication tool, reflects the existing patterns of inequality. The use of social media platforms represent animportant transformation – but not a revolution – in how societies communicate.Despite the growing body of work on social media and politics, there is still much to be learned. It is possible thatTwitter is capturing the opinion of an informed and influential minority that creates opinion changes in the entirepopulation, including those not present on social media sites. The scholarly work on the connection between offlineand online political behaviour is still at its infancy, but shows great promise. A rigorous analysis of this new source ofdata requires developing new and more sophisticated methods, to which we hope to contribute with our work.Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid  (CC-BY-SA-3.0)Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1BuHdBe _________________________________About the authorsPablo Barberá – New York UniversityPablo Barberá is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University and agraduate research associate in the Social Media and Political Participation lab. His primary areas ofresearch include social media and politics, electoral institutions and behavior, and politicalcorruption.Gonzalo Rivero – YouGovGonzalo Rivero (Ph.D., New York University) is statistical scientist at YouGov America. Hisacademic research is focused on political methodology, voting behavior, and electoralaccountability.3/3

Political discussions on Twitter during elections are dominated by those with extreme views

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

LSE Research Online