Analyzing political information network of the U.S. Partisan public on twitter

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.