Most users do not follow political elites on Twitter; those who do show overwhelming preferences for ideological congruity

Sci Adv. 2022 Sep 30;8(39):eabn9418. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abn9418. Epub 2022 Sep 30.ABSTRACTWe offer comprehensive evidence of preferences for ideological congruity when people engage with politicians, pundits, and news organizations on social media. Using 4 years of data (2016-2019) from a random sample of 1.5 million Twitter users, we examine three behaviors studied separately to date: (i) following of in-group versus out-group elites, (ii) sharing in-group versus out-group information (retweeting), and (iii) commenting on the shared information (quote tweeting). We find that the majority of users (60%) do not follow any political elites. Those who do follow in-group elite accounts at much higher rates than out-group accounts (90 versus 10%), share information from in-group elites 13 times more frequently than from out-group elites, and often add negative comments to the shared out-group information. Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to share in-group versus out-group content. These patterns are robust, emerge across issues and political elites, and exist regardless of users' ideological extremity.PMID:36179029 | DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abn9418

Source: Adv Data - September 30, 2022 Category: Epidemiology Authors: Magdalena Wojcieszak Andreu Casas Xudong Yu Jonathan Nagler Joshua A Tucker Source Type: research