Homophily, group size, and the diffusion of political information in social networks: Evidence from Twitter

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate political communications in social networks characterized both by homophilya tendency to associate with similar individuals-and group size. To generate testable hypotheses, we develop a simple theory of information diffusion in social networks with homophily and two groups: conservatives and liberals. The model predicts that, with homophily, members of the majority group have more network connections and are exposed to more information than the minority group. We also use the model to show that, with homophily and a tendency to produce like-minded information, groups are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and the information reaches like-minded individuals more quickly than it reaches individuals of opposing ideologies. To test the hypotheses of our model, we analyze nearly 500,000 communications during the 2012 US elections in a social network of 2.2 million politically-engaged Twitter users. Consistent with the model, we find that members of the majority group in each state-level network have more connections and are exposed to more tweets than members of the minority group. Likewise, we find that groups are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly than users of the opposing ideology.

Diffusion of Multiple Information: On Information Resilience and the Power of Segregation

“…They find higher levels of homophily for the social network aspect. Our results on the importance of biases in social interactions, as opposed to news consumption, complement those of Halberstam and Knight (2014). Indeed, in our model, we find that polarization occurs even with entirely unbiased consumption of news.…”

“…Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011) and Flaxman et al (2013) find that online news consumption is not substantially more segregated than offline consumption of news, providing an argument against a link between internet usage and polarization. On the other hand, in a recent paper Halberstam and Knight (2014) investigate homophily among Twitter users, which is used both as an Online Social Network (OSN) and as a tool to consume news. They find higher levels of homophily for the social network aspect.…”

“…It implies that in investigations into the relationship between increases in internet usage and polarization, the focus might need to shift away from online consumption of news (such as in Flaxman et al (2013), Gentzkow andShapiro (2011), or Sunstein (2009)), and towards OSNs (as in Halberstam and Knight (2014)). …”

Social Media and Corruption

“…Chen et al (2014) find that the content of the crowdsourcing platform seeking Alpha predicts future returns. Halberstam and Knight (2016) find that Twitter users belonging to majority political groups are exposed to more information and get information more quickly than minority groups. All these papers are focused on predictions made using information available online (e.g., on Twitter), but they do not attempt to identify the causal effect (or lack thereof) of blogging and social media.…”

Measuring segregation between rural migrants and local residents in urban China: An integrated spatio-social network analysis of Kecun in Guangzhou

“…Social network analysis (SNA) proves to be an innovative way to assess and help understand segregation beyond the conventional race-and-residence-based perspective (Arie and Mesch, 2015;Halberstam and Knight, 2016). A particular strength of SNA lies in its conceptualization of "cross-place concentrations", for example, of telecommunication between different social groups as an alternative to "framing the residential area as the locus of racial/ethnic concentration" (Montgomery, 2011:659).…”