16.04.2024; Vortrag
Polarization in the German Twittersphere - an analysis of Twitter trends between 2021 and 2023
Eckehard Olbrich, together with Armin Pournaki (MPIMIS) and Felix Gaisbauer (Weizenbaum Institut, Berlin) investigated polarization on Twitter by analyzing both the interaction structure as well as the content of trending topics of the German Twittersphere over two years (March 2021 until June 2023). First, they employed topic modeling to get an overview on the overarching themes in the trending topics. Second, they analyzed (1) whether trends in a topic were polarized, i.e. that the corresponding retweet network exhibited two clusters and (2) to which extent the polarization with respect to different topics is aligned. Analyzing the user alignment across trends between the most retweeted accounts ("opinion leaders") and the most retweeting accounts ("multipliers") they found that both groups are highly aligned across different topics and fall into only two clusters: a more left and a more right leaning cluster. Their findings contrast with recent findings on the polarization of the society based on data from the European Social Survey (Lux, Mau, and Jacobi 2021) where such an alignment was not observed between migration, climate change and LGBTQ* issues. On Twitter, only trends related to the Russian invasion in Ukraine were not aligned with the other topics.