Berlin 2024 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 21: Computational Social Science
SOE 21.3: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 21. März 2024, 17:30–17:45, MA 001
Issue and user alignment in the German Twittersphere — Armin Pournaki1,2,3, Felix Gaisbauer4, and •Eckehard Olbrich1 — 1Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig — 2médialab, SciencesPo, Paris — 3Laboratoire Lattice, Paris — 4Weizenbaum Institut, Berlin
The rise of social media platforms has changed the structure of the public sphere. Instead of the unidirectional one to many communication of classical mass media, social media platforms created a networked public sphere and thus networks are a natural way to study the structure of public discourse on these platforms.
This work investigates the interaction structure as well as the content of trending topics of the German Twittersphere over two years (03/2021 to 03/2023). Do users sort into similar opinion groups across different themes? Are there themes that are more polarizing than others? What is the role of certain types of users (influencers, spreaders) in driving these phenomena?
Using clusters in retweet networks as opinion clusters in the underlying debate, we measure the alignment of users across issues over and show that Twitter users have a general tendency to sort into temporally stable opinion groups, and that certain overarching themes, such as COVID, align users more strongly than others. Furthermore, we investigate the role of power users in driving this alignment and shaping the perception of public debate.
Keywords: social networks; twitter; community detection; polarization