Political Polarization on Twitter

🤖 Plain-English Summary

In this study we investigate how social media shape the networked public sphere and facilitate communication between communities with different political orientations. To explain the distinct topologies of the retweet and mention networks we conjecture that politically motivated individuals provoke interaction by injecting partisan content into information streams whose primary audience consists of ideologically-opposed users.

🔑 Key Findings

• We examine two networks of political communication on Twitter, comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S.
• congressional midterm elections.
• Using a combination of network clustering algorithms and manually-annotated data we demonstrate that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right-leaning users.

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