A Long-Term Analysis of Polarization on Twitter
A Long-Term Analysis of Polarization on Twitter
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Twitter 两极分化的长期分析
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Ingmar Weber
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文献类型：
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作者：
Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella;Ingmar Weber
在过去十年中，社交媒体在塑造政治话语方面发挥了重要作用。与此同时，由于讨论的规模和公共性质，它往往被认为加剧了政治两极分化。在这篇论文中，我们试图回答一个问题，即在过去的八年里，推特上的美国政治两极分化是否有所加剧。我们分析了679,000名用户的大型纵向Twitter数据集，并研究了他们(i)网络中的两极分化迹象-人们如何关注政治和媒体账户，（ii）推文行为-他们是否转发来自双方的内容，以及（iii）内容-他们使用的标签有多党派。我们的分析表明，在过去的八年里，网络两极分化确实有所加剧，而且根据不同的衡量标准，相对变化幅度在10%到20%之间。我们的研究是为数不多的具有如此长期视角的研究之一，涵盖了两次美国总统选举和两次中期选举，提供了罕见的纵向分析。
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In this paper, we try to answer the question of whether political polarization in the US on Twitter has increased over the last eight years. We analyze a large longitudinal Twitter dataset of 679,000 users and look at signs of polarization in their (i) network — how people follow political and media accounts, (ii) tweeting behavior — whether they retweet content from both sides, and (iii) content — how partisan the hashtags they use are. Our analysis shows that online polarization has indeed increased over the past eight years and that, depending on the measure, the relative change is 10% - 20%. Our study is one of very few with such a long-term perspective, encompassing two US presidential elections and two mid-term elections, providing a rare longitudinal analysis.