(August 27, 2015) Twitter
offers a public platform for people to post and share all sorts of content,
from the serious to the ridiculous. While people tend to share political
information with those who have similar ideological preferences, new research
from NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab demonstrates that
Twitter is more than just an “echo chamber.”
The research is published in Psychological Science, a
journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“Platforms like Twitter or Facebook are creating
unprecedented opportunities for citizens to communicate with their peers about
current events,” says researcher Pablo Barberá of New York University, lead
author on the study. “The conventional wisdom is that these environments
exacerbate social extremism and political polarization, but we find that online
communication structures are really flexible and situation-specific.”
Barberá and his co-authors—John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler,
Joshua A. Tucker, and Richard Bonneau—decided to take advantage of a new method
of estimating the ideological positions of millions of Twitter users to
investigate the dynamics of online conversations with respect to a wide range
of public issues.
Barberá and colleagues investigated the structure and
content of Twitter conversations about politicized issues such as the federal
budget, marriage equality, the 2012 presidential campaign, and the 2013
government shutdown. And they also looked at non-political issues such as the 2014
Super Bowl and the Boston Marathon bombing. Their data set contained nearly 150
million tweets that mentioned specific keywords related to these topics.