Political Polarization on Twitter

“For agreement between the 'left' and 'right' categories we report κ = 0.80 and κ = 0.82 respectively, both of which fall in the " nearly perfect agreement " range (Landis and Koch 1977).”

“Modularity (Newman and Girvan 2004) resulting from the cluster assignments offers a first measure of segregation , and reinforces the qualitative finding above.”

“Figure 1 shows the retweet and mention networks, laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm (Fruchterman and Reingold 1991), with node colors determined by the assigned communities.”

“To improve its effectiveness and stability , we seeded the algorithm with initial node labels determined by the leading-eigenvector modularity maximization method for two clusters (Newman 2006).”

“Label propagation (Raghavan, Albert, and Kumara 2007) works by assigning an initial arbitrary cluster membership to each node and then iteratively updating each node's label according to the label that is shared by most of its neighbors.”

“Social media play an important role in shaping political discourse in the U.S. and around the world (Bennett 2003; Benkler 2006; Sunstein 2007; Farrell and Drezner 2008; Aday et al. 2010; Tumasjan et al. 2010; O'Connor et al. 2010).”

“Retweets act as a form of endorsement, allowing individuals to rebroadcast content generated by other users, thereby raising the content's visibility (boyd, Golder, and Lotan 2008).”

“[18], who showed that users frequently produce tweets containing hashtags that table 4.”

“…but, until recently, estimates of individual-level characteristics of social-media users have been calculated only for small, self-selected samples (Conover et al., 2011; Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013) or have focused on variables that are of little direct relevance to the study of…”

“These include information overload and finite attention [41], novelty of false news [57], the selective exposure [52, 40, 39] caused by polarized and segregated online social networks [9, 8], algorithmic popularity bias [45, 20, 37], and other cognitive vulnerabilities such as confirmation bias and motivated reasoning…”

“On one hand, Conover et al. (2010, 2011) find high levels of clustering along party lines: “the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left-and right-leaning users” (Conover et al. 2011, 89).”

“Conover et al. (2011) examine two networks of political communication on Twitter with more than 250,000 tweets from the 6 weeks leading up to the 2010 US congressional midterm elections.”

“…features of the information exchange networks underlying social media create peculiar patterns of information access. homophily [25], polarization [12], algorithmic ranking [3], and social bubbles [28] — information environments with these challenges, here we present Hoaxy , an upcoming platform…”

“These effects were later documented by several studies [9, 15, 23, 25, 27, 46, 50, 56].”

“forms has focused primarily on controversies [3, 13, 20, 21, 45, 52] and anti-social behavior, in the form of trolling [11, 12, 42], sockpuppetry [39], harassment and cyberbullying [8, 23, 32, 35, 55, 66, 79], vandalism [43], hate speech [9, 15, 51, 56, 72], and others [17, 24, 40, 41, 44, 46, 54, 68, 78, 81].”

“Retweeting is often used to amplify the impact of a campaign (Yang & Kim, 2017), and retweet patterns usually reflect political divisions among Twitter users (Conover et al., 2011).”

“Conover et al. (2011) examine two networks of political communication on Twitter with more than 250,000 tweets from the 6 weeks leading up to the 2010 U.”

“In fact political segregation has already been observed on political blogs [29] or Twitter [30, 31].”

“While this method did not achieve the best performance to date (93% vs. 95%), it was benchmarked on a less restrictive dataset than (Conover et al. 2011b) which likely contributed to the small different in performance.”

“Similarly, Conover et al. (2011) study links between political tweets in the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.”

“01 higher than the value that (Conover et al. 2011) found to conclude that Q = 0.”

“j=i N/2+Zp ✓ N/2 Zp i j ◆ q j p ✓ N/2 Zy j ◆ (1 qy) j (7)”

“Among others, it has been used to study influence and credibility [22–26], social structure [27–29] and to monitor users’ sentiment [30–33].”

“Indeed, Conover et al. (2011) show that mentions are often used to speak to (and attack) the opposing side.”

“Social media platforms have been criticized for enhancing political echo chambers and driving political polarization [8-10].”

“ed mention networks — suggesting homophilous endorsement patterns accompanied by a tendency for politically active users to inject partisan content and “call out” their counterparts on the other side [7]. Therefore, even when social media platforms create opportunities for cross-cutting dialog, the dialog is often muc…”

“, 2010), or political polarity (Pennacchiotti and Popescu, 2011; Conover et al., 2011).”

“sing three dierent actions, namely mentioning, replying and retweeting. While some evidences have shown that users tend to exploit in dierent ways the actions made available by the Twitter platform [20], such dierences have not been quantied so far. In this work, we analyze the activities of users from a new perspecti…”

“Partisanship also increases with vocalness of the population.”

“Examples are DeGroot (1974), Ellison and Fundenberg (1993, 1995), Bala and Goyal (1998,2001), De Marzo, Vayanos and Zwiebel (2003) and Golub and Jackson (2010).”

“[55] looked at 250,000 tweets before the 2010 U.”

“An additional evidence of user polarization into two opinion clusters can be given by applying community detection algorithms to the networks and check whether the detected clusters match the group membership of nodes (Conover et al. 2011).”

“This follower network exhibits a classic polarization (Adamic and Glance 2005; Conover et al. 2011) between two denselyknit communities.”

“Future works can include datasets from the electorate at large, measuring mass polarization from other digital traces such as blogs (Adamic and Glance, 2005) and Twitter (Conover et al., 2011).”

“The original valence score described by Conover et al. (2011a) is calculated as follows: where t f ( u , C 0 ) is the number of times (term frequency) item u is cited by group C 0 , and total ( C 0 ) is the sum of the term frequencies of all items cited by C 0 . t f ( u , C 1 ) and total ( C 1 )…”

“2011) and (Conover et al. 2011b) both use modularity (Newman 2006) as a measure of segregation between political groups in Twitter.”

“Regarding Twitter, political polarization was studied in (Conover et al. 2011b).”

“The research in (Conover et al., 2011) showed that Twitter can be used as a platform for political deliberation.”

“Social anxieties surrounding echo chambers posit that social media is another force driving political polarization [20], with a growing body of observational evidence exploring the role of social media in stratifying users across information sources [21].”

“As prior literature indicates (e.g., Conover et al., 2011; Graham, 2016), hashtags affiliated with conservative politics (e.g., #TheGreatAwakening, #WWG1WGA, #tcot, #tgdn) are commonly used by their supporters for self-identification, regardless of the actual topic of the tweet.”

“0% of interactions occur between ingroup members (Conover et al., 2011).”

“Yardi and boyd (2010) and Conover et al. (2011) studied the effect of polarization on Twitter. For some early papers investigating the social network of Twitter, see the work of Java et al. (2007) and Krishnamurthy, Gill, and Arlitt (2008).”

“Finally, the strong polarization, which is often amplified on social media (Conover et al., 2011; Guimaraes et al., 2017), combines with an adversarial use of online platforms to create another typical trait of populist communication (van Kessel & Castelein, 2016; Waisbord & Amado, 2017).”

“[12] found that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated bipartisan structure, which seems to reflect the users’ political leanings, similarly to political blogs [1].”

“It would be useful to apply concepts in political research such as the polarization of public opinion [86]–[88] to look for new ways to approach and understand the dichotomized vaccine sentiment.”

“With the rapid growth of OSNs popularity, we are witnessing an increased usage of these services to discuss issues of public interest and hence shape public opinions [16].”

“In recent years, multiple empirical studies have revealed the existence of segregated communities in online social media interaction [4, 7, 9, 14, 18, 39, 73], where likeminded people interact with little exposure to different viewpoints.”

“The results have important implications for connecting the two theories (Lelkes and Westwood, 2017) and explaining political polarization on Twitter (Conover et al., 2011).”

“To classify a user as biased or neutral, we apply the following finding of Conover et al. (Conover et al. 2010), used to find political polarization on Twitter: users with similar ideologies tend to retweet exclusively each other's messages .”

“4.1), and the extreme bi-modality can be explained by the clear partisan nature of the chosen hashtags and by the known political polarization of users on Twitter (Conover et al. 2011; Barberá et al. 2015), which will be greatly enhanced in the context of a political debate.”

“This is a very strict and conservative partisanship assignment, likely less prone to misclassification that may be yield by automatic machine-learning techniques not based on manual validation, e.g., [21].”

“Conover et al. [22] examined the retweet network of 250,000 political tweets during the six weeks prior to the 2010 U.S. midterm elections.”

“[9] Michael Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew R Francisco, Bruno Gonçalves, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini.”

“Evidence of increasing political polarisation exists in the United Kingdom and the United States, and immigration has featured as a main divisive topic (Conover et al., 2011; Hong and Kim, 2016; Bail et al., 2018).”

“When handling political information, the inherent partisan biases in LLMs could exacerbate echo chambers and polarization (Cinelli et al. 2021; Conover et al. 2021).”

“We assign prominence scores for terms using valence scores (Conover et al. 2011) and term frequencies.”

“This can lead to a balkanization of information, where different subgroups collectively amplify very different information sources and crowdsource very different elites (Conover et al. 2011; Foucault Welles and Jackson 2019).”

“One strand of the literature explores information-seeking patterns by looking at the correlation between exposure and the topological or geographical properties of messages (boyd, Golder, & Lotan, 2010; Conover et al., 2011; Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007).”

“The issue of potential navigation topology has already generated several key studies in other platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, especially with respect to polarization and fragmentation, yielding convincing graph typologies (see, inter alia, [21–25]).”

“There have also been some prior works on whether social media users are receiving multiple perspectives on a spe-cific event or topic (Balasubramanyan et al. 2012; Conover et al. 2011; Park et al. 2009; Adamic and Glance 2005; Borge-Holthoefer et al. 2015).”

“For example, [6] considered both mention and retweet networks in isolation for a collection of users chosen for their political orientation.”

“…’ preference to maintain social relationships with like-minded others only, which leads to polarised networks in which there are few heterogenous social interactions on, for example, Facebook (Bakshy et al., 2015; Kitchens et al., 2020) and Twitter (Boutyline & Willer, 2017; Conover et al., 2011).”

“…relationships in social networks can also be informative (Chen et al., 2015; Volkova et al., 2014; Bergsma et al., 2013); people tend to be friends with people who live in the same geographic area (Jurgens, 2013) or tend to follow users with similar political orientations (Conover et al., 2011).”

“Conover et al. 2011a predict the political alignment of Twitter users in the run-up to the 2010 US elections based on content and network structure.”

“Recent years have seen an increasing amount of attention from the computational social sciences in the study of opinion formation and polarization over social networks, with applications ranging from politics to brand perception [Conover et al., 2011; Gionis et al., 2013; Akoglu, 2014].”

“” Conover and colleagues hand-coded the tweets as liberal or conservative and found one-sided argument (either liberal or conservative) in each community in RT network [9].”