Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Opinion / Why Twitter is a polarizing platform
BackBack

Why Twitter is a polarizing platform

Twitter could have been a great democratic platform for exchange of ideas but has belied its initial promise

Photo: BloombergPremium
Photo: Bloomberg

In his 2012 book Patriots and Partisans, historian Ramachandra Guha wrote a lengthy harangue about Internet trolls. Using numerous conversations over email and letters, Guha pointed out the general disdain for diversity of opinions among his correspondents. Guha found support from several others in India’s public life who have been at the receiving end of vitriolic abuse for holding an opinion that may differ from the views of the majority, or from that of a vocal minority.

Over the past few years, such abuse has shifted from personal email conversations to public platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has largely hogged headlines for being an efficient communication platform for idealistic protesters, such as those involved in the Arab Spring of 2011, but the darker underbelly of the social networking site has not received the attention it deserves.

While the importance of social media as an instrument of change cannot be denied, new studies show that there has been a steady rise in intolerance to diverse viewpoints on social media platforms such as Twitter, leading to what is known variously as echo chambers and information cocoons.

A recent study by Emma Pierson, a statistics student at Oxford University, showed how opinion regarding the shooting of a black youth at Ferguson in the US was sharply segregated among two equally vocal groups, with little dialogue between them (mintne.ws/13xPRjF).

A more detailed study by economists Yosh Halberstam of the University of Toronto and Brian Knight of Brown University using 500,000 tweets from more than 2 million Twitter accounts during the 2012 US presidential election campaign arrives at broadly similar conclusions (mintne.ws/1xkI0np). They present strong evidence to answer two important questions. One, do people with similar characteristics tend to form groups on social networking sites? Two, what is the nature of inter-group interaction on Twitter?

The results of the study show that not only do people engage a lot more with other Twitter users of similar political view, diffusion of news and gossip also happens more among like-minded Twitter users.

Here’s how they do this. The study sampled the set of Twitter users who followed at least one of the candidates for the House of Representatives. It is worth mentioning that following someone on Twitter does not mean endorsement or friendship, unlike on other platforms, say, Facebook. So, Halberstam and Knight infer the political affiliation of voters from the number of candidates of a particular political party they follow. To illustrate the point, consider a voter following more number of Democrats than Republicans and another who follows more Republicans. While the former is bracketed as conservative, the latter falls in the category of liberals.

Halberstam and Knight use a simple measure to capture similar attitudes or preferences. They construct a homophily index, which is nothing but the proportion of like-minded connections within a political group. They also determine ideological segregation as the difference between exposure to own-group and the exposure to other group. The greater this difference, the higher is the likelihood of a voter to follow other voters who follow the same or similar set of people.

Using these two measures, they show that voters are more likely to interact with other voters with similar political affiliation. Social media may appear much more democratic than traditional media but the Halberstam-Knight results suggest that social media dialogue is often a dialogue among the converted.

To be sure, social networks can be effective tools of mobilization, especially in non-democratic societies. Recent research by economists Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ahmed Tahoun of the London Business School and Tarek Hassan of the Booth School of Business establish statistically that Twitter activity led to a surge in anti-establishment protests in Egypt (mintne.ws/1CQb0lQ). Yet, the evidence put forward by Halberstam and Knight suggests that democratization through such networks may be limited in mature democracies.

There are, of course, certain methodological issues related to studies based on data from social networking sites such as Twitter. With a glut of big data, large numbers of studies are now available describing behaviour of social media users. Are these results enough to arrive at the conclusion that there is indeed information-segregation on online networks? Computer scientists Derek Ruths of the McGill University and Jürgen Pfeffer of Carnegie Mellon University in a recent Science journal article question the empirical work based on Twitter data (mintne.ws/1CQblEZ).

Ruths and Pfeffer raise valid questions on the usability of such data. Their main concern is that we have no idea about the representativeness of the sample. Does the Twitter-universe represent the true population behaviour, given that social networking sites are dominated by people of a certain age and income class group? If the samples are not representative, the results may be biased. Statisticians term this as sample bias. Ruths and Pfeffer argue that none of the studies that use Twitter data correct for the bias.

Ruths and Pfeffer also argue that rapid changes in algorithms that Twitter and other networks use make it difficult to obtain valid real-world inferences from the data. Finally, a number of Twitter accounts are either spam or bots. Is there a mechanism that weeds non-human accounts from these datasets?

These problems notwithstanding, a more serious issue is that of estimating political affiliation based on Twitter followers. Ruths and his colleague Raviv Cohen caution that it is difficult to correctly determine the political orientation based on Twitter timelines if the users themselves don’t self-report their affiliations (mintne.ws/1tgFk98).

To circumvent these issues, Halberstam and Knight rigorously validate their results. They compare their own political affiliation measure with estimates derived from Gallup surveys and the two measures turn out to correlate positively. They also calculate the political views from the fraction of voters subscribing to a particular media outlet. The odds that liberal voters subscribe to right-leaning channels like Fox News are found to be very low. These address some of the issues that Ruths and Pfeffer have about the use of Twitter data.

While the Halberstam-Knight results are not the last word on the subject, the evidence they present should make us introspect on the nature of social media platforms, and the wide chasm between what they had promised to be and what they have turned out to be.

In Principles of Political Economy, the 19th century political philosopher J.S. Mill had remarked (mintne.ws/1zW4n0r), “It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar."

“Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress," wrote Mills.

Mills’ words ring true even today. Twitter could have been the platform for free interaction Mills wanted. However, herd behaviour seems to rule the roost on Twitter, and there is little possibility of change any time soon.

Sumit Mishra is a research scholar at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai.

Economics Express runs weekly, and features interesting reads from the world of economics and finance.

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 25 Dec 2014, 11:39 PM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App