Abstract
In this study we investigate how social media shape the
networked public sphere and facilitate communication between
communities with different political orientations. We
examine two networks of political communication on Twitter,
comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six
weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm
elections. Using a combination of network clustering algorithms
and manually-annotated data we demonstrate that the
network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan
structure, with extremely limited connectivity between
left- and right-leaning users. Surprisingly this is not the case
for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by
a single politically heterogeneous cluster of users in which
ideologically-opposed individuals interact at a much higher
rate compared to the network of retweets. To explain the distinct
topologies of the retweet and mention networks we conjecture
that politically motivated individuals provoke interaction
by injecting partisan content into information streams
whose primary audience consists of ideologically-opposed
users. We conclude with statistical evidence in support of this
hypothesis.
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