We mapped the tweets of 520 US Congress members, focusing on analyzing their engagement with two broad topics: first, the COVID-19 pandemic, and second, the recent wave of anti-racist protest. We find that, in discussing COVID-19, Democrats frame the issue in terms of public health, while Republicans are more likely to focus on small businesses and the economy. When looking at the discourse around anti-Black violence, we find that Democrats are far more likely to name police brutality as a specific concern. In contrast, Republicans not only discuss the issue far less, but also keep their terms more general, as well as criticizing perceived protest violence.
We provided quantitative data supporting significant changes between the time Twitter acceptance the offer on April 25 and the time the agreement was finalized on October 27. Republican politicians saw significant increases in their follower counts, while Democrat politicians saw significant decreases.
Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational practices of political parties. Following a deductive approach, we devise a number of quantitative measures from a discussion of theoretical constructs in sociological theory. The resulting measures make different - mostly qualitative - aspects of online conversational practices amenable to computation. We evaluate our computational approach by applying it i…
We analyze the ego-alter Twitter networks of 300 Italian MPs and 18 European leaders, and of about 14,000 generic users. We find structural properties typical of social environments, meaning that Twitter activity is controlled by constraints that are similar to those shaping conventional social relationships. However, the evolution of ego-alter ties is very dynamic, which suggests that they are not entirely used for social interaction, but for public signaling and self-promotion. From this standpoint, the behavior of EU leaders is much more evident, while Italian MPs are in between them and ge…
Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such acti…
Political campaigns are among the most sophisticated marketing exercises in the United States. As part of their marketing communication strategy, an increasing number of politicians adopt social media to inform their constituencies. This study documents the returns from adopting a new technology, namely Twitter, for politicians running for Congress by focusing on the change in campaign contributions received. We compare weekly donations received just before and just after a politician opens a Twitter account in regions with high and low levels of Twitter penetration, controlling for politician…
Element AI（元素人工智能公司）；Amnesty International（国际特赦组织）
We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully curate an unbiased yet low-variance dataset of labeled tweets, analyze it to account for the variability of abuse perception, and establish baselines, preparing it for release to community research efforts. On a social impact front, this study provides the technical backbone for a media campaign aimed at raising public and deciders' awareness and elevating t…
In this preliminary study we compare the characteristics of retweets and replies on more than 350,000 messages collected by following members of the German Federal Diet on Twitter. We find significant differences in the characteristics pointing to distinct types of usages for retweets and replies. Using time series and regression analysis we observe that the likelihood of a politician using replies increases with typical leisure times while retweets occur constant over time. Including formal references increases the probability of a message being retweeted but drops its chance of being replied…
Dedan Kimathi University of Technology（德丹·基马蒂科技大学）
In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and reviews, are very useful for big businesses, markets, politics, journalism, and many other fields. Politics is one of the most talked-about and popular topics on social media networks right now. Many politicians use micro-blogging services like Twitter because they have a large number of followers and supporters on those networks. Politicians, political part…
Ego networks have proved to be a valuable tool for understanding the relationships that individuals establish with their peers, both in offline and online social networks. Particularly interesting are the cognitive constraints associated with the interactions between the ego and the members of their ego network, whereby individuals cannot maintain meaningful interactions with more than 150 people, on average. In this work, we focus on the ego networks of journalists on Twitter, and we investigate whether they feature the same characteristics observed for other relevant classes of Twitter users…
Social media play an increasingly important role in political communication. Various studies investigated how individuals adopt social media for political discussion, to share their views about politics and policy, or to mobilize and protest against social issues. Yet, little attention has been devoted to the main actors of political discussions: the politicians. In this paper, we explore the topics of discussion of U.S. President Obama and the 50 U.S. State Governors using Twitter data and agenda-setting theory as a tool to describe the patterns of daily political discussion, uncovering the m…
Popularity is a critical success factor for a politician and her/his party to win in elections and implement their plans. Finding the reasons behind the popularity can provide a stable political movement. This research attempts to measure popularity in Twitter using a mixed method. In recent years, Twitter data has provided an excellent opportunity for exploring public opinions by analyzing a large number of tweets. This study has collected and examined 4.5 million tweets related to a US politician, Senator Bernie Sanders. This study investigated eight economic reasons behind the senator's pop…
National Institute on Drug Abuse（美国国家药物滥用研究所）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social movement protesting violence against Black individuals and communities, with a focus on police brutality. The movement gained significant attention following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020. The #BlackLivesMatter social media hashtag has come to represent the grassroots movement, with similar hashtags counter protesting the BLM movement, such as #AllLivesMatter, and #BlueLivesMatter. We introduce a data set of 63.9 million tweets from 13.0 million users from over 100 countries which contain one of the fo…
Between February 14, 2019 and March 4, 2019, a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir followed by retaliatory airstrikes led to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries. In this work, we examine polarizing messaging on Twitter during these events, particularly focusing on the positions of Indian and Pakistani politicians. We use a label propagation technique focused on hashtag co-occurrences to find polarizing tweets and users. Our analysis reveals that politicians in the ruling political party in India (BJP) used polarized hashtags and called for escalation of con…
People use Online Social Media to make sense of crisis events. A pandemic crisis like the Covid-19 outbreak is a complex event, involving numerous aspects of the social life on multiple temporal scales. Focusing on the Spanish Twittersphere, we characterized users activity behaviour across the different phases of the Covid-19 first wave. Firstly, we analyzed a sample of timelines of different classes of users from the Spanish Twittersphere in terms of their propensity to produce new information or to amplify information produced by others. Secondly, by performing stepwise segmented regression …
Social media has become an indispensable channel for political communication. However, the political discourse is increasingly characterized by hate speech, which affects not only the reputation of individual politicians but also the functioning of society at large. In this work, we empirically analyze how the amount of hate speech in replies to posts from politicians on Twitter depends on personal characteristics, such as their party affiliation, gender, and ethnicity. For this purpose, we employ Twitter's Historical API to collect every tweet posted by members of the 117th U.S. Congress for …
The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as "ratios", and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. We find that raw activity counts increase during the period leading up to the 2016 election, accompanied by …
With the ubiquitous reach of social media, influencers are increasingly central to articulation of political agendas on a range of topics. We curate a sample of tweets from the 200 most followed sportspersons in India and the United States respectively since 2019, map their connections with politicians, and visualize their engagements with key topics online. We find significant differences between the ways in which Indian and US sportspersons engage with politics online-while leading Indian sportspersons tend to align closely with the ruling party and engage minimally in dissent, American spor…
What are People Talking about in #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate? Exploring and Categorizing Twitter Topics Emerging in Online Social Movements through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model
Duke Kunshan University（杜克-昆山大学）；Data Science Research Center（数据科学研究中心）；Social Science Division Duke Kunshan University（社会科学系杜克-昆山大学）
Ego networks have proved to be a valuable tool for understanding the relationships that individuals establish with their peers, both in offline and online social networks. Particularly interesting are the cognitive constraints associated with the interactions between the ego and the members of their ego network, which limit individuals to maintain meaningful interactions with no more than 150 people, on average, and to arrange such relationships along concentric circles of decreasing engagement. In this work, we focus on the ego networks of journalists on Twitter, considering 17 different coun…
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Auburn University at Montgomery（奥本大学蒙哥马利分校）
Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years, social media such as Twitter has enabled people to share their opinions regarding elections. Social media has provided a platform for collecting a large amount of social media data. This paper proposes a computational public opinion mining approach to explore the discussion of economic issues in social media during an election. Current related studies use text…
Dangerous speech on social media platforms can be framed as blatantly inflammatory, or be couched in innuendo. It is also centrally tied to who engages it - it can be driven by openly sectarian social media accounts, or through subtle nudges by influential accounts, allowing for complex means of reinforcing vilification of marginalized groups, an increasingly significant problem in the media environment in the Global South. We identify dangerous speech by influential accounts on Twitter in India around three key events, examining both the language and networks of messaging that condones or act…
A tweet from popular entertainer and businesswoman, Rihanna, bringing attention to farmers' protests around Delhi set off heightened activity on Indian social media. An immediate consequence was the weighing in by Indian politicians, entertainers, media and other influencers on the issue. In this paper, we use data from Twitter and an archive of debunked misinformation stories to understand some of the patterns around influencer engagement with a political issue. We found that more followed influencers were less likely to come out in support of the tweet. We also find that the later engagement…
Influencers are key to the nature and networks of information propagation on social media. Influencers are particularly important in political discourse through their engagement with issues, and may derive their legitimacy either solely or in large part through online operation, or have an offline sphere of expertise such as entertainers, journalists etc. To quantify influencers' political engagement and polarity, we use Google's Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) to encode the tweets of 6k influencers and 26k Indian politicians during political crises in India. We then obtain aggregate vector r…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter in a different context, namely the protest that paralyzed several countries in the South American region in 2019. By leveraging users' endorsement of politicians' tweets and hashtag campaigns with defined stances towards the protest (for or against), we construct a weakly labeled stance dataset with millions of users. We explore polarization in two related …
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges, from hospital-occupation management to lock-down mental-health repercussions such as anxiety or depression. In this work, we present a solution for the later problem by developing a Twitter emotion-monitor system based on a state-of-the-art natural-language processing model. The system monitors six different emotions on accounts in cities, as well as politicians and health-authorities Twitter accounts. With an anonymous use of the emotion monitor, health authorities and private health-insurance companies can develop strategies to tackle problems s…
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校卢迪信息学、计算与工程学院复杂网络与系统研究中心）；Network Science Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington (IUNI)（印第安纳大学布卢明顿分校网络科学研究所）；Connection Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院连接科学中心）；Sirius XM（天狼星XM公司）
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and Republican party's narratives about the pandemic which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. As shown in this case, as well as in most major social issues, strongly polarized narrative frameworks facilitate such narratives. To understand polarization and other social chasms, it is critical to dissect these …
