Political polarization of news media and influencers on Twitter in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections

James Flamino, Alessandro Galeazzi, Stuart Feldman, Michael W. Macy, Brendan Cross, Zhenkun Zhou, Matteo Serafino, Alexandre Bovet, Hernán A. Makse () and Boleslaw K. Szymanski ()
Additional contact information
James Flamino: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Alessandro Galeazzi: University of Brescia
Stuart Feldman: Schmidt Futures
Michael W. Macy: Cornell University
Brendan Cross: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Zhenkun Zhou: Capital University of Economics and Business
Matteo Serafino: Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York
Alexandre Bovet: University of Zurich
Hernán A. Makse: Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York
Boleslaw K. Szymanski: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, vol. 7, issue 6, 904-916

Abstract: Abstract Social media has been transforming political communication dynamics for over a decade. Here using nearly a billion tweets, we analyse the change in Twitter’s news media landscape between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. Using political bias and fact-checking tools, we measure the volume of politically biased content and the number of users propagating such information. We then identify influencers—users with the greatest ability to spread news in the Twitter network. We observe that the fraction of fake and extremely biased content declined between 2016 and 2020. However, results show increasing echo chamber behaviours and latent ideological polarization across the two elections at the user and influencer levels.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01550-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:7:y:2023:i:6:d:10.1038_s41562-023-01550-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01550-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().