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Analyzing Political Information Network of the U.S. Partisan Public on Twitter

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Transforming Digital Worlds (iConference 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10766))

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Abstract

The growing significance of social media among potential voters has been recognized by politicians because social media provides a direct method for political actors to connect with their citizens and organize them into online clusters through their use of hashtags. However, with few exclusions, most of the former studies stressed on the identification of personal tweets or cumulative properties of a mass of tweets and political fondness of discrete users, not on partisan public in the U.S. Thus, there is a lack of complete understanding about online social network of politically conflicting public and the public discourse in the network. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how people adopt political information on Twitter via hashtag as a networked public and how people facilitate political communication among users with similar or disparate political orientations. This study confirmed the theory of homophily in adopting political hashtags on Twitter network. The referred media and highly mentioned domains for each network also support the concept of homophily. The manually examined users with top betweenness centralities were identified as opinion leaders and their tweeting patterns provide evidences that they play key roles in disseminating information through eWOM by occupying an important relational spot in the network.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Tracy Everbach for assistance with her expertise and for comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Texas, Denton, TX, 76203, USA

    Miyoung Chong

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  1. Miyoung Chong
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Correspondence to Miyoung Chong .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Gobinda Chowdhury

  2. Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Julie McLeod

  3. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Val Gillet

  4. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Peter Willett

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Chong, M. (2018). Analyzing Political Information Network of the U.S. Partisan Public on Twitter. In: Chowdhury, G., McLeod, J., Gillet, V., Willett, P. (eds) Transforming Digital Worlds. iConference 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10766. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_50

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_50

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78104-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78105-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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