Pablo Barberá

Tweeting From Left to Right Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an “echo chamber” (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a “national conversation.” We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.

The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests.

Social media have provided instrumental means of communication in many recent political protests. The efficiency of online networks in disseminating timely information has been praised by many commentators; at the same time, users are often derided as “slacktivists” because of the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button. Here we consider the role of these peripheral online participants, the immense majority of users who surround the small epicenter of protests, representing layers of diminishing online activity around the committed minority. We analyze three datasets tracking protest communication in different languages and political contexts through the social media platform Twitter and employ a network decomposition technique to examine their hierarchical structure. We provide consistent evidence that peripheral participants are critical in increasing the reach of protest messages and generating online content at levels that are comparable to core participants. Although committed minorities may constitute the heart of protest movements, our results suggest that their success in maximizing the number of online citizens exposed to protest messages depends, at least in part, on activating the critical periphery. Peripheral users are less active on a per capita basis, but their power lies in their numbers: their aggregate contribution to the spread of protest messages is comparable in magnitude to that of core participants. An analysis of two other datasets unrelated to mass protests strengthens our interpretation that core-periphery dynamics are characteristically important in the context of collective action events. Theoretical models of diffusion in social networks would benefit from increased attention to the role of peripheral nodes in the propagation of information and behavior.

Political expression and action on social media: Exploring the relationship between lower- and higher-threshold political activities among Twitter users in Italy

Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves politically on these platforms, the more they are likely to contact politicians via e-mail, campaign for parties and candidates using social media, and attend offline events to which they were invited online. These results suggest that lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media do not distract from higher-threshold activities, but are strongly associated with them.

A Bad Workman Blames His Tweets? The Consequences of Citizens’ Uncivil Twitter Use When Interacting with Party Candidates

The recent emergence of microblogs has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape. The platform’s potential to enhance information availability and make interactive discussions between politicians and citizens feasible is especially important. Existing studies focusing on politicians’ adoption of Twitter have found that far from exploiting the platform’s two-way communication potential, they use it as a method of broadcasting, thus wasting a valuable opportunity to interact with citizens. We argue that citizens’ impolite and/or uncivil behaviour is one potential explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with trolling and harassment practices and politicians are often a prime target for such behaviour, a phenomenon altering the incentive structures of engaging in dialogue on social media. To demonstrate this claim, we use all Spanish, Greek, German and UK candidates’ tweets sent during the run-up to the recent EU election, along with the responses they elicited, and rely on automated text analysis and machine learning methods to measure their level of civility. Our contribution is an actor oriented theory of the political dialogue that incorporates the specificity of the social media platform, further clarifying how and why democratic promises of such social media platforms are fulfilled or limited.

From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy

Abstract: How can one technology—social media—simultaneously give rise to hopes for liberation in authoritarian regimes, be used for repression by these same regimes, and be harnessed by antisystem actors in democracy? We present a simple framework for reconciling these contradictory developments based on two propositions: 1) that social media give voice to those previously excluded from political discussion by traditional media, and 2) that although social media democratize access to information, the platforms themselves are neither inherently democratic nor nondemocratic, but represent a tool political actors can use for a variety of goals, including, paradoxically, illiberal goals.

Of echo chambers and contrarian clubs: Exposure to political disagreement among German and Italian users of Twitter

Scholars have debated whether social media platforms, by allowing users to select the information to which they are exposed, may lead people to isolate themselves from viewpoints with which they disagree, thereby serving as political “echo chambers.” We investigate hypotheses concerning the circumstances under which Twitter users who communicate about elections would engage with (a) supportive, (b) oppositional, and (c) mixed political networks. Based on online surveys of representative samples of Italian and German individuals who posted at least one Twitter message about elections in 2013, we find substantial differences in the extent to which social media facilitates exposure to similar versus dissimilar political views. Our results suggest that exposure to supportive, oppositional, or mixed political networks on social media can be explained by broader patterns of political conversation (i.e., structure of offline networks) and specific habits in the political use of social media (i.e., the intensity of political discussion). These findings suggest that disagreement persists on social media even when ideological homophily is the modal outcome, and that scholars should pay more attention to specific situational and dispositional factors when evaluating the implications of social media for political communication.

Big data, social media, and protest: foundations for a research agenda

INTRODUCTION The past decade has witnessed a rapid rise in the use of social media around the globe. For political scientists, this is a phenomenon begging to be understood. It has been claimed repeatedly – usually in the absence of solid data – that these social media resources are profoundly shaping participation in social movements, including protest movements (see Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle, & Fowler 2012; Cha et al. 2010; Jungherr, Jurgens, & Schoen 2012; Lynch 2011; Shirky 2011). Social media are often assumed to affect an extremely wide range of individual-level behaviors, including communicating about politics to friends and family members, donating or soliciting money for political campaigns and causes, voting, and engaging in collective forms of protest. In truth, however, the research community knows remarkably little about whether ( and especially how ) the use of social media systematically affects political participation. Perhaps nowhere is this lack of knowledge more clear than in the matter of political protest. In recent years, the use of social media has been linked to the spread of political protests in cities around the world, including Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, Ankara, Cairo, Tripoli, Athens, Madrid, New York, and Los Angeles. Obviously, social protest itself is far from new, but the fact that it is possible for potential protest participants, as well as geographically removed observers, to access real-time accounts of protest behavior documented and archived through micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter) and social media (e.g., Facebook) websites is a novel phenomenon. Protest activities are flagged by participants themselves with distinctive hashtags on Twitter. As political scientists, then, the question of how these activities on social media actually affect the decision of individuals to participate in protests would seem to be a subject ripe for research, as too is the macro question of how social media changes the nature of protest itself. As is often the case in both popular and scholarly commentary, new phenomena inevitably engender a counternarrative, claiming that the phenomenon is either not new or not important. The rise of social media – and the concurrent level of fascination accorded to it across the media spectra – and its relationship to mass protests movements have been no exception in this regard.

Social Media, Personalisation of News Reporting, and Media Systems’ Polarisation in Europe

The chapter uses Twitter data to investigate the extent to which British, Italian, and Spanish journalists employ Twitter to comment on the news as well as reporting on national and European topics, and, conversely, the degree to which the audiences these journalists manage to attract on Twitter reflect the journalists’ or their media outlets’ political affiliations. Our findings suggest that national contexts matter, as journalists working in media environments characterised by lower degrees of parallelism are less likely to use Twitter to provide commentary on the news than those working in outlets or systems where parallelism is higher. We also show that both journalists and news outlets are less likely to editorialise when they tweet about the EU than when they focus on domestic politics.

The Quality of Citations: Towards Quantifying Qualitative Impact in Social Science Research

The quantity of citations (“times cited”) has evolved into an influential indicator of scientific impact both in itself and packaged into other metrics (e.g. h-index, impact factor). In this study we contrast the idea of “quantity” with the idea of the “quality” of citations, i.e. the “quality” of impact. We develop and present methods that can be used to move from a superficial assessment of citation quantity to a more nuanced view of the quality of citations. We illustrate these methods using six highly cited study in the fields of political science, economics and sociology. In the future this more nuanced view and the data we are generating should allow for testing various hypotheses linked to the reception of scientific works and the sociology of science more generally. Our study is complemented by opensource code (based on R) that shall be collected in a R package CitationsR that allows other researchers to pursue their own analyses of the quality of impact of one or several studies.