Political polarization on microblogs has been studied in terms of the user interaction between partisans and across partisan lines, such as echo chamber effects and the cross-ideological information diffusion.
Although previous studies imply that politically neutral users might mediate the discussions, it has not been examined how the overall cross-ideological interactions are taken place by politically leaned and neutral users, and how these interactions differ between ideologies. In this study, we investigate the distribution of political leanings and behaviors of users that are involved in the cross-ideological interactions on Twitter. Our findings show that cross-ideological interactions in polarized topics are
asymmetric in terms of users’ political leanings, and the distributions of those interactions would give us insights on measuring soundness of discussions and understanding the process of polarization.
Publication
- Takumi Omae, Masashi Toyoda and Sho Cho, “Analyzing Political Polarization on Microblogs with Social Network Segregation and Users’ Political Leanings”, The 12th International Conference on Social Informatics, 2020