The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public became more polarized in response to these influences over the course of the election is not well understood. In this paper we propose IdeoTrace, a framework for (i) jointly estimating the ideology of social media users and news websites and (ii) tracing changes in user ideology over time. We apply this framework to the last two months of the election period for a group of 47508 Twitter users and demonstrate that both liberal and conservative users became more polarized over time.
@cite_18: An individual’s words often reveal their political ideology. Existing automated techniques to identify ideology from text focus on bags of words or wordlists, ignoring syntax. Taking inspiration from recent work in sentiment analysis that successfully models the compositional aspect of language, we apply a recursive neural network (RNN) framework to the task of identifying the political position evinced by a sentence. To show the importance of modeling subsentential elements, we crowdsource political annotations at a phrase and sentence level. Our model outperforms existing models on our newly annotated dataset and an existing dataset.
@cite_47: In this paper, we discuss a variety of issues related to opinion mining from microposts, and the challenges they impose on an NLP system, along with an example application we have developed to determine political leanings from a set of pre-election tweets. While there are a number of sentiment analysis tools available which summarise positive, negative and neutral tweets about a given keyword or topic, these tools generally produce poor results, and operate in a fairly simplistic way, using only the presence of certain positive and negative adjectives as indicators, or simple learning techniques which do not work well on short microposts. On the other hand, intelligent tools which work well on movie and customer reviews cannot be used on microposts due to their brevity and lack of context. Our methods make use of a variety of sophisticated NLP techniques in order to extract more meaningful and higher quality opinions, and incorporate extra-linguistic contextual information.
@cite_23: Parties, candidates, and voters are becoming increasingly engaged in political conversations through the micro-blogging platform Twitter. In this paper I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded has the potential to become a source of information about policy positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic (, 2001), this is, the propensity of users to cluster along partisan lines, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that scales Twitter users along a common ideological dimension based on who they follow. I apply this network-based method to estimate ideal points for Twitter users in the US, the UK, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. The resulting positions of the party accounts on Twitter are highly correlated with oine measures based on their voting records and their manifestos. Similarly, this method is able to successfully classify individuals who state their political orientation publicly, and a sample of users from the state of Ohio whose Twitter accounts are matched with their voter registration history. To illustrate the potential contribution of these estimates, I examine the extent to which online behavior is polarized along ideological lines. Using the 2012 US presidential election campaign as a case study, I nd that public exchanges on Twitter take place predominantly among users with similar viewpoints.
Recent works on estimating the political ideology of social media users include @cite_18 and @cite_47 which infer users' ideology based on the text in their social media posts using an recurrent neural network framework and natural language processing techniques respectively. In @cite_23 , political ideology is inferred by jointly estimating the ideology of Twitter users and the politicians that they follow using a Bayes ideal-point estimation model.