Read on Twitter
This is incredible. These scholars have mapped party factions using Twitter data, leveraging the Jan purge. You can see how large and integrated the Q-Anon faction is with Republicans. Excising the cancer with “clean margins” is not possible. We can draw many lessons from this 1/ https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/1358088750765539329
1. The interaction between elites and citizens on social media plays a significant role in spreading (mis)information. SoMe allows elites and non-elites to be connected in ways that weren’t possible in the old traditional media market. Increased connectivity creates echo chambers
that provide a false sense of certainty. Information people receive from within their cluster is absolutely trusted, and comes pre-filtered and triangulated. Information from outside one’s cluster is strongly distrusted. Elites promote and reinforce viewpoints that others spread.
2. The black nodes that represent suspended accounts also represent users that are more likely to have violated democratic norms, as these norms are similar to those in the Twitter user rules. The graph is visual evidence of anti-democratic sentiment deeply ingrained, and most of
it is in one party—Republican.
3. Before his removal, Trump was at the bridging center of the Q-Anon and GOP clusters. These clusters are distinct but very tightly connected.
4. As suggested in the Nature piece, the political information environment on social media plays an
3. Before his removal, Trump was at the bridging center of the Q-Anon and GOP clusters. These clusters are distinct but very tightly connected.
4. As suggested in the Nature piece, the political information environment on social media plays an
outsized role in structuring politics. We think of traditional institutions, like political parties, as being the gatekeepers that reinforce democratic values and thereby maintain democratic institutions, but the flow of communication in SoMe (and campaign finance, I suspect)
means that parties are not the gatekeepers controlling how political actors and voters are connected—the venues where they connect control how the connections play out. In a world where social media companies control the rules of engagement, these companies—more than the
political parties—are the mechanisms that reinforce the norms. If democratic norms are not being enforced and democratic values are declining, it’s at least in part due to lack of enforcement in the venues where people connect most about politics.
5. This observation has serious
5. This observation has serious
implications for how we need to regulate media and campaign spaces—the regulations must reinforce and reflect the most essential democratic values: mutual respect, restraint, rule of law, liberty, justice, etc. FIN
P.S. Notice the connections between the Democratic and Republican spheres are exclusively from the mainstream segments of each party. The Q-Anon cluster is only connected to the GOP cluster. This helps explain why Dems are so perplexed.
Democrats scratch their heads and struggle to understand the extreme right bc it’s *very* far from where they live. You have to travel across the bridge and through Republicanland to even get a glimpse.
