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Researchers Are Bummed Out by Shallow Political Retweets

A new study shows Twitter users become even less engaged during political media events.
Image: Flickr/Penn State

Even among "politically engaged" users, Twitter is mostly just an echo chamber, rebroadcasting the quips of pop thinkers like Bill Maher and Sean Hannity and offering little new substantial content authored by more everyday users. This is the core finding of a study released Sunday in the open-access journal PLOS ONE examining some 290 million tweets posted during "media events." These are defined as prearranged, often scripted political happenings, like a presidential debate or nominating convention (in contrast to breaking news events, like "the Obama administration's response to the Benghazi attacks and Governor Romney's '47%' statement," in the paper's words).

The study found in its analysis that the sort of tweet volume increase that might be expected around a media event, but also "more highly concentrated attention by replying to and retweeting particular users, and elite users predominantly benefiting from this attention." Additionally, overall interpersonal communication among this politically engaged set went down during these events, as users essentially turned into RT factories.

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"Frankly, we're rather disappointed," said co-author Drew Margolin in an accompanying press release. "Social media has so much potential to improve the diversity of voices and quality of exchanges in political discussion by giving individuals the technological capability to compete with the mass media in disseminating information, setting agendas and framing conversation." In other words, instead of using Twitter as a tool for self-empowerment, users reinforce those already in power. Business as usual: more voices, but the same number of speakers.

The study's methods are worth getting into, at least briefly. The researchers narrowed their view of the Twitter data stream by first identifying a subset of users that might be considered politically active. Simply, if a user popped out of the general stream with a comment or retweet or hashtag that was political in nature, that user got resorted into the subcategory, resulting in a “computational focus group” of just under 200,000 users.

The team then extracted the tweeting histories of those users by way of a simple Python script. With the user set in place, the next step was to identify a peak hour-long period around the different media events, and then extract data on "unique users, tweets, retweets, mentions, and hashtags." From this data, and using baselines derived from non-event and "unexpected event" tweet observations, it was then possible to determine a a metric of "relative attention."

"At the individual user level, information sharing behaviors, like using hashtags or retweeting, increased during media events, while interpersonal communication behaviors, like replies, decreased," the paper concludes. "This lends support to the idea that the condition of shared attention created by media events serves to make individuals more group focused and less involved with their normal social foci."

This would seem to be bad news for our current self-destructive mess of hyperpolarization, itself at least somewhat a function of the rise of internet-enabled personal info/opinion bubbles. "Combined with our findings about concentrated attention to elite voices and diminished use of interpersonal communication, these factors could combine to create ideal conditions for rumor persistence, belief polarization, and the dissemination of misinformation that can (intentionally or unintentionally) undermine deliberation," Margolin et al write.

That would support some very clear shifts in the overall political discourse in recent years. But, while intuitive, such a conclusion is not guaranteed. "However, the attention given to elite users during media events may provide opportunities for good-faith actors to limit the spread of misinformation by using content-based strategies of issuing repeated retractions, emphasizing facts instead of repeating myths, giving pre-exposure warnings about the likelihood of future information, offering simple rebuttals to complex myths, and fostering norms of strong skepticism," the paper continues. So, all we need now are some "elite" good faith actors.