Comparing Influencers: Activity vs. Connectivity Measures in Defining Key Actors in Twitter Ad Hoc Discussions on Migrants in Germany and Russia

Bodrunova, Svetlana S.; Litvinenko, Anna; Blekanov, Ivan S.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_22

Cited by 18 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Direct comparisons of ad hoc discussions (Bruns & Burgess, 2011) are currently viewed with some doubt in academic literature. Without developing a strictly comparative research design, we have argued elsewhere (Bodrunova, Litvinenko, & Blekanov, 2017;Bodrunova, Blekanov, & Maksimov, 2017) that the conflicts we picked for the analysis are similar enough as research cases. They share a range of attributes: a violent interpersonal trigger, outbursts of public discussion across media platforms (becoming trending topics on Twitter), social polarization along the inter-ethnic or inter-race chasms, street action, and involvement of federal authorities.…”

Section: The Research Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As this work is part of a bigger research project, our methods of data collection were described in detail previously (Bodrunova, Litvinenko, & Blekanov, 2017). Here, we briefly describe the steps we followed.…”

Section: Data Collection and Pre-processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to bridge these gaps in previous studies, we look at Twitter discussions regarding inter-ethnic clashes; they have similar conflict triggers and structure of social groups involved into conflict (Bodrunova, Litvinenko, & Blekanov, 2017). Whilst avoiding making straightforward comparisons, we explore users' political polarization and suggest a mixed method to detect it across three cases in different political regimes: the USA; Germany; and Russia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond Left and Right: Real-World Political Polarization in Twitter Discussions on Inter-Ethnic Conflicts

Bodrunova¹,

Blekanov

Smoliarova³

et al. 2019

MaC

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Studies of political polarization in social media demonstrate mixed evidence for whether discussions necessarily evolve into left and right ideological echo chambers. Recent research shows that, for political and issue-based discussions, patterns of user clusterization may differ significantly, but that cross-cultural evidence of the polarization of users on certain issues is close to non-existent. Furthermore, most of the studies developed network proxies to detect users’ grouping, rarely taking into account the content of the Tweets themselves. Our contribution to this scholarly discussion is founded upon the detection of polarization based on attitudes towards political actors expressed by users in Germany, the USA and Russia within discussions on inter-ethnic conflicts. For this exploratory study, we develop a mixed-method approach to detecting user grouping that includes: crawling for data collection; expert coding of Tweets; user clusterization based on user attitudes; construction of word frequency vocabularies; and graph visualization. Our results show that, in all the three cases, the groups detected are far from being conventionally left or right, but rather that their views combine anti-institutionalism, nationalism, and pro- and anti-minority views in varying degrees. In addition to this, more than two threads of political debate may co-exist in the same discussion. Thus, we show that the debate that sees Twitter as either a platform of ‘echo chambering’ or ‘opinion crossroads’ may be misleading. In our opinion, the role of local political context in shaping (and explaining) user clusterization should not be under-estimated.

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Section: The Research Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Data Collection and Pre-processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Beyond Left and Right: Real-World Political Polarization in Twitter Discussions on Inter-Ethnic Conflicts

Bodrunova¹,

Blekanov

Smoliarova³

et al. 2019

MaC

Self Cite

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“…First, we had to divide the users for each hashtag into top and ordinary ones. To select the important users (influencers), we have used the tactics developed by the research group for earlier research [Bodrunova et al, 2016a[Bodrunova et al, , 2016b. To select the influencers, we calculated nine parameters for each user who posted.…”

Section: Rq3 Are Multilingual Users Important For the Discussion? Domentioning

confidence: 99%

A global public sphere of compassion? #JeSuisCharlie and #JeNeSuisPasCharlie on Twitter and their language boundaries

Bodrunova¹,

Smoliarova²,

Blekanov³

et al. 2018

THE MONITORING OF PUBLIC OPINION

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“…The dataset was collected and pre-processed via a specialized web crawler with changeable modules (Bodrunova, Litvinenko, & Blekanov, 2017; for the use on YouTube, see the study by Bodrunova, Litvinenko, Blekanov, & Nepiyushchikh, 2021). The number of comments was 120,411, and the number of commenters was 34,770; beside this, data for cross-account commenting and data for graph metrics were uploaded.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Self-Critical Public: Cumulation of Opinion on Belarusian Oppositional YouTube before the 2020 Protests

Bodrunova

Blekanov

2021

Social Media + Society

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YouTube-based discussions are a growing area of academic attention. However, we still lack knowledge on whether YouTube provides for forming critical publics in countries with no established democratic tradition. To address this question, we study commenting to Belarusian oppositional YouTube blogs in advance of the major wave of Belarusian post-election protests of 2020. Based on the crawled data of the whole year of 2018 for six Belarusian political videoblogs, we define the structure of the commenters’ community, detect the core commenters, and assess their discourse for aggression, orientation of dialogue, direction of criticism, and antagonism/agonism. We show that, on Belarusian YouTube, the commenters represented a genuine adversarial self-critical public with cumulative patterns of solidarity formation and find markers of readiness for the protest spillover.

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Comparing Influencers: Activity vs. Connectivity Measures in Defining Key Actors in Twitter Ad Hoc Discussions on Migrants in Germany and Russia

Cited by 18 publications

References 35 publications

Beyond Left and Right: Real-World Political Polarization in Twitter Discussions on Inter-Ethnic Conflicts

Beyond Left and Right: Real-World Political Polarization in Twitter Discussions on Inter-Ethnic Conflicts

A global public sphere of compassion? #JeSuisCharlie and #JeNeSuisPasCharlie on Twitter and their language boundaries

A Self-Critical Public: Cumulation of Opinion on Belarusian Oppositional YouTube before the 2020 Protests

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