Beyond binary labels: Political ideology prediction of twitter users

Abstract

Automatic political preference prediction from social media posts has to date proven successful only in distinguishing between publicly declared liberals and conservatives in the US. This study examines users' political ideology using a seven-point scale which enables us to identify politically moderate and neutral users - groups which are of particular interest to political scientists and pollsters. Using a novel data set with political ideology labels self-reported through surveys, our goal is two-fold: a) to characterize the political groups of users through language use on Twitter; b) to build a fine-grained model that predicts political ideology of unseen users. Our results identify differences in both political leaning and engagement and the extent to which each group tweets using political keywords. Finally, we demonstrate how to improve ideology prediction accuracy by exploiting the relationships between the user groups.