Online Fragmentation in Wartime

Deen Freelon, Marc Lynch and Sean Aday

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015, vol. 659, issue 1, 166-179

Abstract: Theorists have long predicted that like-minded individuals will tend to use social media to self-segregate into enclaves and that this tendency toward homophily will increase over time. Many studies have found moment-in-time evidence of network homophily, but very few have been able to directly measure longitudinal changes in the diversity of social media users’ habits. This is due in part to a lack of appropriate tools and methods for such investigations. This study takes a step toward developing those methods. Drawing on the complete historical record of public retweets posted between January 2011 and August 2013, we propose and justify a partial method of measuring increases or decreases in network homophily. We demonstrate that Twitter network communities that focused on Syria are in general highly fragmented and homophilous; however, only one of the nine detected network communities that persisted over time exhibited a clear increase in homophily.

Keywords: Syria; Twitter; fragmentation; network analysis; longitudinal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:659:y:2015:i:1:p:166-179

DOI: 10.1177/0002716214563921

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